This poem is entitled A Sideways Suicide.
"This evening, when I go off with myself,
I go off with myself.
This is a suicide, this going off.
This is a sideways suicide, but I mean to give this to you.
I needed a brain, the way in which it would feel itself
so that when the rain came as it did this afternoon,
I knew I'd go off to you.
When I committed suicide, it wasn't easy.
It wasn't easy, by any means.
Everyone I didn't know wanted to talk about it,
but their manner of talking about it was manner.
Hovering like a plane that didn't land but kept believing
in itself, as if it would.
They also had a way of leaving me out.
Even as they talked, they talked as
if I had nothing to do with it.
My own suicide.
My fallen men and my fallen women, who have
wept now here in my body, in the very disparate areas
of my body, for 12 years.
I thought it appropriate they left me out.
That they hovered over me although it angered me
at the same time.
An author's note would say something like this,
five minutes or so, but I am not an author.
I think authors are assholes and that hesitation
is a jealousy that is no better than feeling sorry,
which is no better than the absence jealousy finally means.
The author's note says something like,
we'll finally meet in 1950 or in 1976
or for that matter, that we won't meet.
Like the rain, today and this evening,
won't meet me, as much as I would like it to.
I don't think the rain is worth coming back to.
I don't think suicide is worth coming back to.
And this leads me to think that the body itself
isn't worth it either.
This would mean that the mind is in an even worse place.
Falling back, like a memory that has no possibility
of being remembered.
Or it means this.
When I committed suicide, you were startled.
At the same time, there was a warm place.
A warm place entitled departure.
The way an author, an asshole, would entitle it.
And in this distance, there is the same kind of memory,
as the memory I see that crosses your face, even
from the easy loving that rain was and will be.
One evening, I will submissively return to this departure,
and I will walk in back of myself like a shadow will walk.
Like a shadow now walks in back of myself.
I will disconnect any old grief you feel.
I will take it.
I will take it off the wall, like you can take the telephone
off the wall.
Then I will speak on that phone.
Authors are assholes.
The rain that is lost is memory that is lost, like you are.
And I'll walk.
I will walk in a very local direction
and I will revenge the change that memory brings as it must
bring change as it changes."
Thanks.