A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

about suffering, and it's abusive to the reader.
I fully sense how annoying this would be to someone who
has a better handle on himself emotionally. I wish I was Gary
Cooper, but I'm afraid I am closer to Peter Lorre – haunted,
childlike, guilty and confused.
I am trying to be more optimistic and less lurid. One thing I
pray for is not be a prick and not to inflict myself on people. Not
to be the Old Man of the Sea, perching and preying on people’s
sympathies. I’m trying. I meditate, I exercise, I pray.
But it may be a futile prayer, because God (the real one)
seems to have made me this way in his mysterious pretzel logic,
twisted and salty like a fossilized tear.
But thank you to G.O.D. of Burnsville (Burnsville, get it?)
for the love in this poem, that comes all knotted up with your own
hot emotions.
I have been asked if I know who G.O.D. is. No, I don't. It
could be an old friend who knows me too well. More likely, it is
someone I never have met. Several friends advise me that the
letter feels like a death threat – and that the letter seems to be both
blaming me for the boy's abduction, and taking credit it for it
himself. Like the references to the Zumbro River – I have never
written anything like that, so that part is all him.
(1996)
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