A new pen

April 3, 1981

I think I’ll buy myself a new pen

One with new words in it so I

Won’t have to see these words when

I’m crying on my pillow or cry-

ing when I’m down; I know it’s bad

when I can’t rise and face the day

that same old loneliness I had

when I was alone and used to pray

that someone somewhere would come

along and save this dying soul

of mine, no one came, no one

and I dug myself another hole

and lay there in my self seen shame

and moaned there in my peppered pain.

Things keep mounting: my ex girlfriend, my alcoholic uncle, my mad mother.

What’s the sense of going to school when there so sense of survival beyond it.

This hole I dug is filling with me on its bottom. There’s a gap in my chest and it feels empty. I feel it slowly opening like a bad tooth, ready to collapse in on itself until only the hole remains, with only the sharp, crusted edges left, like a stone henge to some mysterious past whose purpose has been forgotten.

Yeah, I think I’ll buy a new pen, one that inscribes a different life, one that inks this page with happy thoughts – that’s the difference between 8th Street in Passaic, and Oak Street in Paterson, except time, as if I have spent a decade presuming I made advances, when in truth I only marked time.

I can’t even blame my ex-girl friend this time. She’s 23, I’m 30. I ought to know better, have learned something, and have not.