Staying Alive
Sometimes, your energy is just about keeping the train on the tracks and moving forward.
These days
I spend my time
keeping myself alive,
walking a tightrope
between
then and now and when
breathing in still air
that once
slept in quiet valleys.
I hold my dog close
and hope the curtains
will keep from closing
and if I’m lucky
I’ll get a little applause too.
I drink my bottles of wine
and hope what appears
won’t disappear
and that maybe I might
dream myself another
go around.
I pick up my book of
Borge’s essays
and vacation deep in
my own gold mine.
I count angels on
heads of pins and
prick myself with one
now and then
just to check
if I’m still here.
I think of Anne Sexton
in her car, mouth
fresh with chilled vodka
and her heart full of
tired, bitter tastes.
What last went through
her mind
as she
drifted away
to the unalive?
I look for the hand
that rolls the dice but
can’t seem to make it out
in the distance, so
I crawl back
onto the table where
fate does her surgeries
and keeps what she can alive.
I’m very busy these days
trying to keep myself alive.
It’s a full time job
avoiding all possible train wrecks.
All the other usual things
the dishes, the rendezvouss
the reaching for this or that
the ceaseless back and forth
hiss and moan
of day to day
can wait.
I got to keep myself alive.
I’m living in dangerous times.
If I don’t concentrate and focus
I may turn my head and
not be here anymore
the only trace
a coffee stain on a desk
where I once
kept this dream
of here and now
alive.
That image with the train is frightening, as is the whole poem, this feel of impending suicide. I feel for the narrator.
There's a quiet stillness in this poem, where Borges and Anne Sexton visit and the dishes are left undone.