The mushrooms helped again: walking hangdoggedly to the granary after the empty mailbox trip I saw across the barnyard at the base of an elm stump a hundred feet away a group of white morels. How many there were will be kept concealed for obvious reasons. While I plucked them I considered each a letter from the outside world to my little cul-de-sac, this valley: catching myself in this act doing what I most despise, throwing myself in the laps of others. Save my life. Help me. By return post. That sort of thing. So we throw ourselves in the laps of others until certain famous laps grow tired, vigorous laps whose movement is slowed by the freight of all those cries. Then if you become famous after getting off so many laps you can look at the beautiful women at your feet and say I'll take that foot and that breast and that thigh and those lips you have become so denatured and particular. They float and merge their parts trying to come up with something that will please you. Selecting the finest belly you write your name with a long thin line of cocaine but she is perspiring and you can't properly snort it off. Disappointments. The belly weeps but you dismiss her, sad and frightened that your dreams have come to no end. Why cast Robert Redford in your life story if all that he's going to do is sit there and piss and moan at the typewriter for two hours in expensive Eastman color? Not much will happen if you don't like to drink champagne out of shoes. And sated with a half-dozen French meals a day you long for those simple boiled potatoes your estranged wife made so perfectly. The letters from your children are defiled in a stack of fan mail and obscene photos. Your old dog and horse have been given to kindly people and your wife will soon marry a jolly farmer. No matter that your million-selling books are cast in bronze. On a whim you fly to Palm Beach, jump on your yacht and set the automatic. You fit a nylon hawser around your neck, hurl overboard, and after the sharks have lunch your head skips in the noose like a marlin bait. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CHURCH-PORCH by GEORGE HERBERT AT A VACATION EXERCISE IN THE COLLEGE by JOHN MILTON THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL by OSCAR WILDE THANKSGIVING DAY by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH NORTHERN EARTH MOOD by WILLIAM HERVEY ALLEN JR. |