Cleopatra and the Clown

                         1.

Procrastination saved my life, or--

There's nothing more pathetic

Than a procrastinating suicide

We'll either do it or we wont

But the depressing thing is

Every possible method has been done

And done to death.

Our suicide says nothing

Our attempt to stylize our death is meaningless

Our attempt to get the timing right

To execute the details

Causes us to delay and say:

If it were only 1850 again

And a romantic suicide were still possible

If only the motivations were still pure and honorable

Like they were for Tchaikovsky

Whose homosexuality and deep melancholia

His creative genius and his bad forced marriage

Swirled together a tortured brine

In the river of his mind

Who can imagine this scene without the theme

To Romeo and Juliet?

As Tchaikovsky wades out into the freezing torrent

His large muscular wife striding after him

And fishing his skinny ass out by the trousers

She pulled him back and made him live

Wouldn't let him go.

But eventually some years later

Death and Tchaikovsky found each other

After a second attempted drowning failed similarly

He contracted cholera and went out on his back.

Even in the modern era

An artistic suicide was still possible

Vachel Lindsay reaching for a bottle of lye

And drinking it down.

A horrible death. Unimaginable suffering.

His poems out of style, himself defenseless

Against criticism and poverty which is criticism.

A country bumpkin in an urbane era

What it must have been like to realize

That no one cared about your work

Or about your lifetime that you spent

Singing and preaching the gospel of beauty

To an ugly generation.

By the sixties Hemmingway's suicide

Had taken years to accomplish

When his bottle of gin was no longer accommodating

His favorite shotgun was.

Whatever else can be said

A shotgun suicide is at least not vain

Harboring no pretension concerning

The state of one's corpse

But every suicidal artist is finally

A variation on the theme of Thomas Chatterton

Whose suicide by arsenic in 1770

Accomplished the goal of all his plagiarists,

That is, he shamed his society

Into an admission of guilt.

Into an acknowledgment,

Not that the artist has trouble adjusting

To the way the world is

But that the act of adjusting to the world

Requires a sacrifice that some are unwilling to make

And those of you who have made it should be ashamed

Of what you've become.

The boy Chatterton just eighteen when he died

In desperate poverty

Being ripped off by his publishers

Literally starving, he finally spent his last pennies

On the poison that killed him.

                       2.

“The dead are just dead,”

My friend Harry Haller used to say,

“The real suicides are the living,

For whom the thought of death is a continual comfort

The suicide knows death is available to him

If he turns the knob and opens the door.”

But what is behind the door?

No one can say

And the finality of the thing

And the mess we would leave behind

The financial mess and the moral mess

And those who would be inconvenienced

By the bloated corpse of it all

The image of the Mexican steel worker

Crazed with jealousy

Who drove his wife at knife point to the mill

Embracing her he jumped into the smelting furnace

With its radiant molten ore

A leaping flame

A brief puff of steam

And a steel a little richer in carbon

Than the engineers had intended

One possible definition of living

Is putting off death for another day.

Each breath pushes death back a step

Into the future.

                   3.

In the garden at night

A young man in anguish

Sweating big drops of blood

Prays while others sleep

What is the source of his conflict?

His spirit at war with the will of his flesh

The flesh that wanted to live on

To bib wine and eat great portions

Against the gnosis of his father's will for him--

His conscious choice of death

And who can guess the motivation of his betrayer?

Who spent the silver pieces on a bit of land

On which to wring his neck and spill his guts.

An old man centuries earlier could have escaped

The death proportioned for him.

His friends had made everything ready

A prison guard could easily be bribed

A boat was ready to whisk him away

Under cloak of darkness

But he preferred a dignified death

To an undignified life

Though his arguments ring hollow

And tinny to our ears

For his gift was not reasoned argument

But rank stubbornness

He drank the hemlock and paced

The floor of his cell

Until he went cold

                           4.

“A gift of figs I bring,” the Clown said to the queen.

And in the basket find a remedy

For her who asked of the physician

An easy way to die.”

“Put your basket down,” said Cleopatra to the clown.

“The gift of figs you leave with Aspic venom found

Whose bite will leave no mark upon my breast or wrist

Whose kiss will leave the bloom of death cold upon my cheek.”