(NOTE: if I’m writing about it, i’m past it. ok?)

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1.
Left exit only —
it’s all the way over there?
I shall turn the wheel
and drive across all the lanes
to reach it, brakes yelling,
wheel chattering, traffic
suspended around me.

That is the way I wanted to go,
in a fanfare of obvious; now,

I’d settle for an idling engine
in my grandmother’s garage, bottle beside me and
a notebook too, perhaps, drifting toward
far less eventual notice.

2.
Your admonition
to cheer up
just makes me want to
tell you to recall that
underneath every smile
one can see a skull.

3.
I think of the boy I knew
who died in the winter of 78
stuck head down in a snowdrift
not ten feet from his parents’ door.
They didn’t find him till spring.

He was ten. No one would ever believe
it was a suicide at that age
so it must have been an accident.
Right?

In 1978 I was 18.
I’d been thinking about it
since I was 9 and
I envied that frozen boy,
because I was also a frozen boy
and being head down in a snowdrift
sounded so warm.