Read These and Suicide’s Note: An Annual
By: The Hairpin
Tags: Featured Poet, Mary Karr, Poetry

by Mary Karr

The Hairpin will be collaborating every two weeks with the good people at Poetry Magazine to bring you new work by wonderful writers. We’re excited about this development, and hope you are too.

Read These

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom

where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love

before at last taking himself away. His head away. His

recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine

themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more

than instruments of his creation. Pawns.

Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us

studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.

Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down

from the high dive. The contest was seriousness

he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius

and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.

Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping

his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web.

He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider

and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread

and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back

and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came

to hate the court he held.

He was crowned with loneliness

and suffered for friendship, for fealty

of the noblest sort. The invisible crown

rounded his temples tighter than any turban,

more binding than a wedding band,

and he sat in his round tower

on the rounding earth.

Read these,

saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing

himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest

aspects of the human heart

with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable

as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.

I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.

And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc

bag was an air-tight chamber

for the regal head — most serious relic,

breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

Suicide’s Note: An Annual

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus

though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown

between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters

and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that

I couldn’t

today name the gods

you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being

impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d

roast in Hell poor suffering

bastards like you, unable to bear the masks

of their own faces. With words you sought to shape

a world alternate to the one that dared

inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you

could not, could never

fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn

your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you

inherited. More than once you asked

that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera

I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief

in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your

death feel like failure to everybody who ever

loved you as if our collective cpr stopped

too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse

punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction

that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not

God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.

I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite

your best efforts you are every second

alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,

each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.

— Poetry, September 2012

Poet and memoirist Mary Karr was born in 1955 and raised in Texas. The author of several critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Abacus (1987; reprinted 2007), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (2001), and Sinners Welcome (2006) she is also the author of a trilogy of memoirs: The Liar’s Club (1995), Cherry (2001), and Lit (2009).