Lapacho epistolary
I can remember the day
I realized I was old
I sat on a sheep's wool throw
In my writing chair
Compression socks like manacles
Around my ankles
My imagination was between tenses
I thought of all the places I travelled
Although the water was warm
I was never at ease
I thought of all the words I wrote
After the poems were done
And I sent them on their way
I felt so lonely
Jenny comes on Wednesday
I lifted my feet so she could vacuum
There's $75 on the counter
When the sun comes
Into the sitting room
It feels amniotic
The warmth on my face
Is a sedative
The way the light fractures
Through a glass paperweight
And throws colour on the walls
My favourite birthmark purple
Stains the wall above the Escritoire
I never lost my intrigue in words
Escritoire is just French for writing desk
I remember visiting Versailles
As a boy
I leant into the fountain
And pinched the copper-green
Nipple of a nymph
As if forming it between thumb
And middle finger
You could say I'm imbued with
That most unattractive of words
Larrikinism
We ate bread and pastries for breakfast
I was always hungover
I took pain pills and had bizarre dreams
About my French teacher
Who reeked of cigarettes
In Beaune I kissed an innkeeper’s daughter
She was ugly
And tasted of Pinot noir
My point is I couldn't be further
From France in this place or anywhere else
In this Exile
For 35 years I've stayed in
This place I don't belong
There's nothing romantic in practice
About isolation
If you asked me why I stayed so long
I'd tell you I didn't have a choice
The mathematics of destiny
Or rather economics compelled it
I could never survive on words alone
And now closer to death
Then further away from it
The work stands as an anthology of delusion
Suspended in the light
Lining the walls of this room
Packed into the bookshelves
Opening any of the pages
Is like hearing the voice
Of an old friend
Closing them is to feel
The nostalgic longing
Of warmth past
I used to approach the pen
With such elán
The plots and characters seeped
From my fingertips
And danced on the page
I imagined the reader
Becoming bound by the plots
Parts of the brain previously dark
Lighting up like fireworks
Under attack from astonishing originality
Now my penis leaks
And no matter how many times
I vigorously shake it
Piss trickles stain my undergarments
I drove to town today
I passed O.B Mulvey's place
They had silver tinsel around the rail
On the shoulder of the front gate
It glittered in the pale yellow light
There are fires started by dry lightning
And the smoke clouds out the sun
Everything is in sepia
Oswald Barry Mulvey was a man of words
But didn't have much to say on the matter
When we ran into each other
Usually we'd just stick to stock prices and weather
I didn't care much for either
And here’s where we differed
O.B also farmed the land like his father
And his grandfather
He was from here and I am not
So although we were both in periodicals
And slaves to the pen
We never met as equals or contemporaries
At least not in his cataract eyes
I was always the better writer
So I just rounded it down to jealousy
Anyway It must have been his daughter
Who put the tinsel out because Old Oswald
Is buried in Moree graveyard now
They say he had a rotten prostate
Wonder if that's what I've got
Why I can't stop pissing
The graveyard is a desolate place
It's hot as hell
I bet it bakes the corpses in their boxes
One curious corpse
Is that of Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens
Youngest son of Charles the writer
How he came to be in this miserable place
I don't know
They say he died childless and riddled with debt
Tipped unceremoniously into an unmarked grave
I feel for him
I really do
He too knew the pain of exile.
When I came here I figured that boredom
Would be fertilizer for creativity
I thought the minimalist landscape
Would give space for imagination to fill
Descriptive flourishes would become precious
Like water
I was mostly right but not as right as I'd like
But the water whilst sometimes reduced to a trickle
Has never stopped flowing
For that I should be grateful
Writing Poetry is the most uncool thing one can do
In 35 years I've never stopped believing this
Fuck what’s cool
I've always believed it's not my job
To dissect and serve up the message
If I see a painting I don't want to
Have all nuance and shade explained to me
I would rather unwrap it myself and feel what may
One feels good poetry not understands it
The more time one toils on the craft the more isolated and delusional they become
Until they serve up irritating nonsense
Cleaved from the autist's brain
The public rejoices or remains indifferent
Either way one continues this masochistic habit
To what ends I’ve never been able to ascertain.
To all my readers
I wish you a merry festive season
Thank you for your support this year
Yours in words,
Tommy Chigurh