my dear god, we are all so small

photo by Christy Marx


There's something about death which brings us back to the little things not being important,  the big things being so and everything needing to be kept simple. "Just love each other" is the simplest common denominator, in my opinion, yet often I forget,  as there are so many battles in life, many of them stupid, some not so.

So Christy Marx. I'd not been in touch with you, my friend for six months and then I heard she was gone.

So here is something from the "way back machine", a poem published in The Blood Orange Review which seems appropriate today.

She also followed my writing, and would reference the poem of mine (below) often, as she did on the anniversary of my first year sober. (Maybe the only piece of mine she ever read?)

Missteps

When I raised my hand

told a gray room the reasons I started drinking,
I wanted to start again immediately.

Told people, whose faces looked like

The End of the World, the truth.

Then I told them I would pour that girl

I had lusted for down like whiskey,

her lovely legs spread until they snapped,
so I could feel like I used
her, an orgasm, I gulped, which rained

down my neck like streams of veins.
Oh, I said I never used dope,
when I asked her for it
nicely, she said,  No,
she never would give it up,

just got up, waltzed out of my life.
So I begged: Please, God, stay with me
tonight, here in this basement. Please,
I can't picture heaven.

-----------------------------------

Your sense of humor was wonderfully twisted. It will be one of the things I'll always think about when I think of you. Farewell, my friend.