A Letter Found in Judy’s Drawer

Dear Ma, think it’s time we talked.  I need to
and there’s no one else, nor ever has been.
I’m tired, Ma, so damned tired.  I don’t blame you
for the blind mindless days ( I see no end )
or the circling dark, the child-like routine
of waking and crying – it’s pathetic,
I know – I’m just too wretched to pretend
anymore.  I’ve tried so many things but
this human life hurts, hurts me to the quick:
Christ, heroin, alcohol, they can’t cure
the nauseating guilt that twists my gut,
the deep unanswerable loneliness,
why, Ma, why?  Why should I have to endure
this island life, this broken onlyness
so far out that I can’t even sight land,
can’t connect to it?  I don’t understand.

Even beauty hurts, Ma, pierces my skull
like foil in a filling – silver and gold,
acute and beautiful in the early
evening sky, so pale-blue pure, clear above
the brick blocks that break the skyline, so full
of oblivion, of all that I hold
deathly dear.  The other day, a surly
grey one with dank rainclouds banked blank and mauve
beyond the mind, I broke down, cracked and wept
in front of everyone – how they all stared!
Shrugged it off with a patronage of cheap
pity, a poor glib ‘get a grip’ that kept
their hearts pristine of true pain ( never cared
much for pity, Ma, just contempt gone soft ). 
It was the sun that set me off, the deep
cloud cleared and there it was, new-minted, sharp,
tinselled to a metal glint; weird, adrift,
but still as a fountain coin that glimmers
on the flat bottom – a calm fluid warp
of time and place:  I thought of those summers,
bright clean moments in my mind’s dull water,
a death ago – mother, father, daughter.

It’s five years now since he died.  You never
knew why he did it.  I did.  I knew why
he got in the car that day and sealed all
the windows; he left me that too.  If ever
I told he said that he would have to die,
and he did ( though I never did ) and now
I want that peace too but I’m frightened he’ll
be there.  These things that are in my head – how
do I live with them?  Tried to cut them out,
tried – broken glass, towels soaked red to my wrists:
some pains, like cancers, inoperable.
Don’t know anymore what it’s all about,
anything – some days I’m hardly able
to control my temper, to keep my fists
from trashing my room.  An old wife told me
once that unpulled splinters in time will reach
the heart – I thought it a tale; you must see,
Ma, it’s impaling my soul, please don’t preach,
I’m close to screaming, screaming without cease
no peace no god no peace no god no.