And another poem that came out in the New Yorker
about the same time, a year or so ago.
"Suicide Note."
I take no virtue of this, as I finger the handgun.
Insulted, as I am, by too much power of life.
Too small, too hurt in an alien place too large
to manage belief.
Victim of abominations.
Beyond the horror and the terror of the grave,
I can make no moral distinction of good.
Evil overwhelmed me.
I require obliteration, and shall give it to myself
with one pull.
Impersonal, final, and timeless.
How to cross back through the vile tracks that have brought
me to this sane conviction?
I am too depressed to know, too weak to care.
Veils and mists, mists, fogs and veils,
cover my life from the beginning to this end.
The tricky ways of the living were without help.
I go useless to the useless land of the dead.
It was the unrighteousness of the bad Germany,
without the hope of kindliness or mercy,
has brought me to the edge of the peace of my ruin.
I attest.
I cancel the letter you sent me, God.