another sad #poem for tonight, inspired by the recent publication in Strand Magazine of a rare and previously unknown one of #raymondchandler’s #poems.
i read a reviewer today, covering off as she was this literary discovery, and who in so doing called the writer one of the most empirical there had ever been. she either didn’t know how to spell lyrical or simply didn’t ever get #chandler’s amazing capacity for real #poetic #prose.
for me, that is, and for what it’s worth, #chandler was the #fitzgerald of #crimefiction.
when #chandler’s wife died, he fell into a deep depression and never recovered. he himself died five years later. what’s been recently published (though to my chagrin i have yet to read it in its totality) is called “Requiem”: being a #requiem for his awfully missed wife.
my poem, meantime, written this evening around the idea not the content of #chandler’s work, befits the #narcissism of our own century: in my case, my #poem is a #requiem for myself.
i’m sure #chandler’s is much grander. but either way, here is mine:
i'd rather be sleeping with a knife
than a wife
i'd rather be lying on a slab
than through my mouth
i'd rather be face down in mad muddy gutters
than face up to pain and utter single words again
i'd rather be a body in a zip-up bag black
than be bagging a future no one recalled
i'd rather now hurt people who hurt me all this time
than be hurt any further in my dowdy stupid life
i'd rather choose last of all to take what's mine and only this
than have people around me taking the piss
as they argue till red in their idiotic faces
how instead i'm actually committing a crime
and so i'd much rather say in this way i always had
that i loved you to the end (with no intention at all of bad)
than be the man who then failed to beat
this human i'm just as clearly become
mil's page 