Better Living Through Modern Chemopsychotherapy

(or, more succinctly: Alkaloids and Alcohol, A Celebration of Life)

Time was once upon a time I noticed

mostly good times--dappled dawn drawn mornings

merry misanthropic days--and poems that read

like Gerard Manley Hopkins' did

shit--who wants to die that young?

The other day I was sitting at the kitchen

table late at night   I'd just finished a

book about revolutionaries    I shook my head

having come to the conclusion that they'd sold their

convictions for deep sounding rhetoric--

an easy crutch in a less than malleable world

And then I laughed at myself as I washed

down a few dibenzazepines with a shot

of Jack Daniels (black label)--me pointing at crutches

They all killed themselves one way or another--

they were revolutionaries...

and their poetry! it was fantastic

Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour

Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus

and who could forget Anne Sexton's Her Kind

of The Dead Echo of W. H. Auden?

Me? I haven't even got the guts to off myself--and my poetry

sucks

(small consolation)

Christopher J. Cramer

July 1986