Tag Archives: suicide

Sylvia Plath and so many other suicides

Posted on August 14, 2014 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Someone female sitting in the lobby late one night tossed The Bell Jar aside and groaned a curse.  Headed for the wagon yard, I reckons.  So I picked up Plath’s tome and read enough to remember everything else I ever knew, ever wanted to know about Sylvia Plath.  Most vividly I remembered a poem, Daddy, by Ms Plath.  Some University of Texas poetry course caused me to write a ten page paper about it once.

I learned to hate the thought Sylvia Plath and her lot shared this planet with regular human beings.  And after reading a while on Bell Jar, chunking it, I wrote this:

Virus of the mind

The drumbeat litany of hatred
And blame;
Of smug mindless naiveté
Numbs the mind.
Alienation is a welcome gift
From the universe
When it involves the inability
To identify with THAT.

The preoccupation with death
As though death is an unnatural state,
Created by a dark maker for the shallow purpose
Of providing a source of terror and sadness
For tiny humans;
Leaves me with a yearning:

Just once I’d like to see a poem
Just once.
A poem full of truths:

“I gave you permission
to hurt me and make me angry;
because of my illusions and expectations
you never agreed to satisfy
and didn’t
now I’m angry.

“I wanted you to behave a certain way.
Because I wanted it, I demanded it
In my expectations of you
without saying so.

“I wanted you to give up your choices.
I didn’t want it
because giving them up would make you
happier
Or more fulfilled.
I just wanted it because I wanted it.

“I’m used to getting my way.
I’ll hate you if I don’t get it.

“I’ll hate you fiercely
and if that doesn’t work
I’ll threaten to kill myself
Just to get you back.”

Or,

“I’m angry.  I’ve always been angry.
Life isn’t fair and it pisses me off.
I haven’t gotten everything I want.
Sometimes my parents weren’t kind to me;
Didn’t give me what I wanted.

“I talk to my friends and they’re angry, too.
The more we talk the more we realize life isn’t fair
And it pisses us off.

“We talk among ourselves
About how cool it would be
To kill some of those flawed bastards
We don’t like.

“We savor our anger; our hatred
We wallow in it
And think of different ways we’d like to kill
The bastards we don’t like;
How much we’d enjoy killing.
We all know
Because took a voice vote.

“Some nerd who wears his glasses crooked
And isn’t cool;
Some football jock who gets all the girls
We’d like to get;
We hate the girls and the jocks.

“Some sarcastic adult who isn’t cool
And doesn’t respect our views
About how the world is.

“We’d like to kill them all.
We took a voice vote
And we all agree.”

“We haven’t studied much
Nor read much
Nor lived much
Nor listened much
But that doesn’t keep us
From knowing how life is;
How life should be.”

“We’re angry and we’d like to kill them all!
We took a voice vote.

“And by God you’ll see
You’ll be sorry
When I kill myself!”

And the Ted Hugheses of the world , the Daddys

Sort through selective memories to avoid the truth

About this creature they loved.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003 Jack Purcell

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Posted in 2014, America, Poetry

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Suicide: Make it count, son. There’s money to be made.

Posted on August 14, 2014 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Shortly after I came back to town after The End of Life As We Know It and the Y2K I gave myself [you can probably find the stories of that by searching the blog for Y2K] I went to work graveyard shift.  Travel Lodge, maybe, or Motor Inn, night clerk.  11pm-7am.  That story’s here somewhere, too.

Those nights in that motel were always long, sometimes interesting, never boring.  At least not to me, but I don’t recall ever having been bored this lifetime.

One night a guy came down from his room and sat in the lobby, just wanted to talk.  He was in town as part of a team cleaning up a particularly messy suicide.  That’s what he did for a living.  Travelled all over the place where suicides happened and left a terrible mess, maybe a hazardous one.

Interesting guy, with a perspective about suicide and life that I mightn’t agree with, but am glad I encountered anyway.  So sometime one of those long nights later I wrote this thing I might have once called a poem:

Industry

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Is tasteless and inconsiderate.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.

Lawsuits, insurance forms
Police reports
Accident reports
For a non accident.

Clerks, cops, lawyers
Funeral directors
Morticians
And the little guy.

Someone has to clean up
Those brain and bloodstains
On the walls and carpets;
Pick the bone fragments
Out of the doorframe
With a pair of needle nosed pliers;
Plug the holes
Re paint. 
Mop up those
Sidewalk body fluids
Untangle the lariat
Or phone cord
From the light fixture
Scrub bathtub
crimson rings.

Someone has to manufacture
Sleeping pills
Bullets
Razorblades
Ropes.

And hospital beds
For the faint of heart.

Some of that’s still
Made in America
(Good quality, too
And I’m damned proud
To say it.)

It’s hard times.
A man has to go where the work is.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.
It’s commerce.

From Poems of the New Old West, copyright 2003, NineLives Press, Jack Purcell

Old Jules

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Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans need to toughen up

Posted on April 1, 2014 by | 15 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Evidently these people who volunteered for the most recent Presidential Wars seem to be coming home and offing themselves at a rate of 22 per day. Probably there’s a hidden message in there somewhere.

But the big problem is they’re whining and crying about it beforehand, trying through their, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization to get new special treatment and benefits for themselves and hire professionals to talk them out of it.

IAVA’s efforts have made an impact, as Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.), the first Iraq war veteran to serve in the senate, introduced comprehensive legislation that would increase mental health professionals at VA, enhance collaboration with the Pentagon, and review cases of soldiers who may have been wrongly discharged for “invisible wounds.”

“Returning home from combat does not erase what happened there, and yet red tape and government dysfunction have blocked access to the care that saves lives,” Walsh said in a statement to Business Insider. “It is our duty to come together for real solutions for our heroes.”

Just my opinion here, but there’s a really money-saving way to prevent all that. Veterans speaking out noisily to potential enlistees telling them all the reasons they are going to hate themselves for volunteering to serve in a Presidential War might be a good beginning. Then quitting accusing themselves of being heroes next breath after rolling ’round on the floor weeping about not enough sympathy.  Recognizing there are concomitant sacrifices that come with the financial and other benefits for joining a military force.  Abdicating personal moral and ethical choices to politicians and soldiers where the information’s already out there about the brushfire wars the nation loves to submerge itself in.

Hell, these people offing themselves know best whether their lives are worth living. But if they want a shoulder to cry on there’s plenty of help available already through the VA, and it’s easily accessible. Just take a look on the right sidebar:

https://www.myhealth.va.gov/mhv-portal-web/anonymous.portal;MHV_JSESSIONID=slK7T6vZ49t4TLd81GkdytND025vBpWx4msqx0qJplMXny1WpT0B!-1419889142?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=mhvHome

What almost certainly won’t help is  S.2182,  the Suicide Prevention for America’s Veterans Act to liven things up.  It would save a lot of money and effort, not to mention veterans hating themselves afterward, if we’d just stay the hell out of Presidential Wars.  See if that doesn’t clear the problem up without any mindless legislation.

Old Jules

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Posted in America, Military, US Army

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Love affair with demons

Posted on October 18, 2013 by | 6 comments

Hi readers.

I spent a lot of time on the phone with a guy I barely know last night.  He called me to talk about the chronic determination he has to kill this body he lives in.  Old guy, mutual friends with some friends of mine who are concerned about him, suggested we talk.

The guy lives in California, seems to occupy a situation so similar to my own it’s unsettling to me, hearing how unhappy he is with it, how much he thinks he hasn’t got that he wishes he had.  Me listening as he describes it, thinking, wow, that sounds cool.  Sheeze, I could stand some of THAT.

But I was lucky enough to have been where he is long enough ago so’s when he tells me about the abyss he’s looking into I know what he’s speaking of.  Even though it’s foreign country to me.

I know how I climbed out of it, probably even understand why I managed it.  And telling him doesn’t help him a bit so far as I can discern.  The only help I can be is listening to him, same as the friends who arranged for us to talk listen to him and can’t actually help.

I am what I’d call an expert on me being happy, damned good at the job.  But I do recall having a nest of demons living in my head, a self-sustaining fluctuating feed-on-itself hell that seemed to leave self-destruction as the only alternative that made sense.

Listening to the echo of that so long ago in my past from an old guy who lives so nearly to the way I live today skates along the edge of bizarre.  And as nearly as I can tell there’s not one thing I can tell him that will provide a means for him to escape.

Because I came away with the feeling he’s in love with that nest of demons or gives them more room to talk with him listening than he gives anyone else who’s talking to him, cares about him.  And they’re telling him the only escape is killing the body he lives in.

After we finished talking I was lying there scratching a cat behind the ears awed how he and I managed to get to opposite ends of the spectrum, how the Universe can manage having room for both of us.

Old Jules

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Posted in America, Human Behavior

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