Won’t you please just
get to know me won’t you
please just tell me what
you find since I don’t
know a fucking thing
about me.
I’m almost nearly drunk enough to write
so write I shall—
it’s strange
well not really
but it’s that time of year
when I breathe smoke and the
dormant shivering skeletal trees loom
and no matter that things are
going exceedingly well for me as of late
no matter
no matter
because it’s in my blood
or so they say
I wish it weren’t so
but in any case
there’s no hope
it doesn’t matter
even if there were hope
I’d die
die die
die
it doesn’t matter
it doesn’t
matter
these things end one way
I feel nothing but anger or at least I feel it
in the way that despair manifests
as anger
never been an angry man
but here I am
becoming what I never was
and always will be
these words mean nothing
even to me
just drunken non-meaning
because maybe I’ll live
and be happy someday
right
or maybe I’ll die and
never be
and still
it won’t matter.
It always comes
in the fall
the cynicism the dark fucking
turn of my goddamned
broken mind
and all I can do is write it
or what would I do
what would
I
do.
I’ll get past it, I will
I always have but still
I wish this was good
I really do
but it isn’t
and that’s the very very
best I can
do.
It’s not so bad
I make it out like it’s
something else but it’s
not so
bad—
after all I’m alive
and I’m not likely to ever
live again
and so for now
I can sit here
and write
and sip whiskey
and hear at high bitrate
through well-reviewed and expensive
headphones
the sounds I like to hear,
safe from the
cold and
the rain
and the war and famine and disease
and what the fuck am I complaining about?
I’ve made strides
for I believe
this is the first poem I’ve ever written
with a relatively clear head with
thoughts passing through my brain
at a normal pace and
not at the
speed of
speed
and I know this isn’t good
writing
I know everything I’ve already written
already beats the
everliving shit out
of whatever this is
and I know that I’ll
never again write as well
as I did
but if I don’t
I hope I don’t.
I hope I never do
because take one look at
my ruined smile and my
dead eyes and
see what that
cost me.
And I would’ve ended this there, in my draft of this poem
I wrote on May 30 2017
but these are better times. Or they’re
becoming so.
Anyway I have to believe they are now after
after longer than I’d ever gone without, after all if they
aren’t then why did
I do it at all?
or rather why did I
not do it?
these are better times
which I needed
because I
was at the end of my
fucking rope
strangling, dying
hanging from it.
Was.
I’m going nowhere
and I’m going
very very
very
fast.
It is my understanding that the
world does not very
much care about
me
which is all right, for
I do
not very
much
care about the
world
either.
…
This is a certain sort of
peace at which I arrived
upon the wings of
of what I’d known
to be pain
beyond reckoning,
or pain which
at least to me alone is
unreckonable.
It makes no difference.
So I wish with all the sincerity I’ve got left
no more pain, not for anyone, not ever again
and I ask you, please listen if only to this
I’m begging you, hear me, please
when I promise this:
this peace is dear to me and
I will defend it.
And so know I will burn your
skyward pulpit of paper
while you shout screaming slurred
still perched up on its summit—
it’s a righteous flame perhaps
that you’ll burn in,
but burn in it you will
to the whirling ashwhite
echo of time’s passage,
empty—
without shape or pretension;
if you aim to take from me my personal peace
making room for your hollow high
holy hegemony—
then I will with
all of my force
and my fury
drive you
down
dead
decayed
to the wastes
of eternity.
I don’t feel
but I remember what it’s like
and I don’t know but
I can remember what it’s like—
felt this way for a long time
longer than I can remember,
felt nothing
any which way at all
and it’s pretty fucking hard to live
when you just don’t care
I just
don’t
care
not about anything
nothing at all.
It’s not living
not alive;
I’m breathing
thinking, doing, being
but I’m not alive, not living.
I’m tired.
I am.
Friendly plans made among friends
to engage in activities which
characterize and largely
comprise friendship—
we’ll get a beer next time I’m in town
next time you come around
like the old days
like the not good but better than these days, days
past by—
plans made without any real intent
desire, or expectation on either end
of follow-through.
It happens a number of times
here and there, over the course of
a couple of years
and that’s how you wake up one
morning clear and brisk
quite
alone.
But you’ve always enjoyed your
own company, enjoyed it more than just
about anyone else’s
so solitude most of the time isn’t any
sort of burden
and it’s often very much your preference
though you don’t resent people in any general sense,
you rather actually tend to like them,
you just like yourself
just a little bit
too
much
and therefore in the end, yourself is
all you get
and you’re the only reason why.
Self-criticism, in verse.
Time’s passage in perpetuity
struck such staggering
blows
to youth—
all hope, our hope—
all faith in the future
and the seconds slid slowly as centuries when
we shattered;
beliefs beaten, butchered
ideals broken up into
short shimmering shards sharp as
straight razors, slung across
searing stellar streams of screaming smoke and steam,
like shell-shot slivers set to shred souls into strips—
strewn stiffly about, shouting in stark stuttered
shock
all shining under skies stained with stilted
steely starlight of silent
solar spheres, smiling
dead across the
wastes of
time and
space—
dead smiles
dead lips and dead eyes
twisted into hideous smirks of caustic mirth
gazes fixed in the black.
Those staring stars are turned toward us,
we civilized machines of carbon
we who bow before our own brilliance, our antibiotics and our
diesel-electric locomotives and our intercontinental ballistic
missiles;
we who poison ourselves to pass the time,
we the sole manifestation of an empty universe in possession of the
capacity to conceive its utter emptiness,
we who tried to fill it with our follies
we who—we—who’d been so sure, whose salvation was
so certain—
or so we shouted as
we slaughtered ourselves—
so certain, so certain,
but we’d merely mistaken for sparks of cosmic affirmation
that we might have indeed been significant
that dead sneering scorn of dead distant suns
which fell upon our fields of forty thousand felled
before batteries of rifled artillery pieces;
but their bitter grins aren’t real
and there is nothing.
Because the folly of men oft felled folly itself, clear-cut forests of fallacy
in our pursuit of salvation
eternity, infinity
but in the end
it wrought only ruin.
Oh, man’s forlorn delusion-obscured impotence
And the stars all strung up in their sockets
each whose dead fixed stare touches nothing
do not exist
just illusions of our own illustration
and we too are illusory, and our being is
much too fleeting to be—
for the stars and the seas could switch and we might
tumble through the earth toward cerulean skies and
we might fall upon the heavens from below
and then out here, like the rest,
out here where the weed decays,
we might have long been
already but rust
and stardust.
This means nothing.
Much of what I write
has no point
which, incidentally
is the point
and a funny little paradox
I won’t begin to understand.
We all do what
we can.
We all do
what we can
just what we can
just as well as we can.
Even the devil’s
probably
doing no worse
than the very best
he can.
D. B. DEVILLIERS 