Dreaming of Mercy and the death of Anne Sexton.....

You think about wallowing in the hurt-light lavender eclipse of solitude on Mercy street at 4 in the morning after drinking and you think about Anne Sexton smoking Salem cigarettes taking intermittent swigs from a translucent bottle of Vodka cradled under her arms in the fashion that is somehow a hybrid between a running back and a sozzeled sommelier, stumbling into the dank paint thiner back scent of her garage, a jangle of keys cupped in the skeleton cage of her thin-calcium depleted fingers as she opens the passenger side door of her Buick like a wing to hearse shuffling in on the knobby caps of her knees, the bottle of vodka still semi-martini chilled leaving a stinging moist-kiss of alcoholic dew on her lips with each tilt of her head setting the self-nauseating scepter down the way as if buckling in a child, using both hands to clank the door shut, pressing down south on the diminutive Seattle space needle like lock employing only the ashen pasture of her lower palm the way the toothless alchemists of south Cambridge once looked down into her own hand as if supplicating for alms, offering a jackolantern smile dripping in decay when noticing the envelope crease of her life-line, the high tea good china of her earlobes registering the wind-chandelier chimes of keys being thrust in a nihilistic-otiologist like fashion, given a twist, another splash of vodka caroling down her lips in white rivulets lost as the casket in which she cowers begins to sputter and purr and cough, another swig of crisp vodka convincing herself that she is sure of it this time as the heralding tuft of a grisly plume begins to spill into the dashboard she thinks of her anatomy as a hyphen no longer able to staple the emotive syllables of thought together as one like dead tooth rosary beads.




The young writer sits in his writing desk in West Peoria banging into it as if it were some sort of wooden anvil-- a prowl on a ship that he thinks will some how bring her back to him, seated the corner of Sherman and Cedar, banging away at his fathers type writer that looks like something salvaged from a diesel engine thinking about Anne sexton, writing poems with a picture of Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan and TS Eliot and Ezra pound and Anne Sexton plastered over his desk thinking about kissing the ashen planks of her flesh so white they look like the converse side of a stamp before being licked. He thinks about kissing her. He thinks about visiting her at her office while her husband is at work and swatting the typing machine off the side corner of her own desk, a flurry of half-finished poems floating up in mid-coital haste like tissue doves at Christmas and as he enters the toughness of her chin he think about the teethmarks she would leave on your fingers, approaching each guitar-swirled dactyl like a toddler approaches a muffin with a birthday candle on it in pre-school, hushing his blank tv screen of his eyes, mentally cogitating about everything that is inside of him, fucking her on her writing desk the way he believes he can some how save her in calculated hard thrusts-- the caterwaul of his Neanderthal ancestors pleating two slabs of granite together as if in prayer, the sound of the first poem followed by an amused grunt of assent, an in his mind he believes he can somehow save her, as the petals of her eyes opens and closes the way an electric garage opens and closes. The muffler purring as if in ithophaliic post-coital fashion and how through the dashboard there is somehow hollowed concavity of death, the echo that reverberates the distillation of the wink of sound after you pray and supplicate, fucking her like you can save her, like the cork of your elbows and brow of your waist can serve as some kind of metaphysical buoy as the paleness of her southern limbs and perfectly manicured toes kick up forming the first letter of your last name, the seismic fault of her marachino lips offering out a final plosive hosanna, the sound of God, a tuft of smoke, an absolute nothingness that sounds like an amen.