In one letter it was suggested that the poet should have died years
                                                                                                   earlier.
Evolution had caught up with him, by leaps and bounds.
Those things that cannot be spoken of discretely came back to haunt
                                                                                                   his final days.

They wanted me to pull back the skin and expose his cranium like
                                                                                             an orange.
Show the living pain, that organic thing that is fed by the wind
And cannot find a home even here on this raft at the center of the mind.

Unfold the tale of the life or the life of the tale, the book, pretend,
                                                                                           if you can,
That this cranium holds the complete journal of living and dying
                                                                                wound in a tight ball.
Rumors are the cure to knowledge of the personal kind.

Over martinis in a downtown bar on New Year's Eve at the end of
                                                                                               the last century
The moment was ripe for the poet to lay out the strips of his
                                                                                               personal life.
They were sewn together so that I could finally climb down.