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Jack Conway |
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The Suicide Social Club To whom it should concern: I have gone to the suicide social club. Should you decide to come, bring along a plastic bag to knot around your head. There will be a warm bath and razors waiting inside and a comic suicide; they say he's knocking them dead. I have forgotten that I forgot to tell you that I was going but I left this note for you propped against the empty bottle of pills in the liquor cabinet. I know how strange it must be to be strange but we cannot collaborate any longer on the meaning of life, plucked like a fish hook jabbed into the mouth of some flounder as we flounder along, one world at a time. This infectious experiment will ultimately be cured, so let the night place one of her celestial fingers to her lips as we join the joiners trying to pick the lock at death's door. Our goose is cooked and there is no silverware in sight. That bleating you hear is simply the multitudes crying out: "Give us more pomp and circumstance," and we'll be as satisfied as a dry cleaner at a nudist fest. Red Pens I sit correcting papers at the sturdy Shaker table, stacking stacks of them in some elaborate battle plan; red pens, scattered like spent soldiers, casualties of this long war of words. I move the red pen to where transitive verbs carry you from here to there, marking how you've gone from active to passive voice, noting where first person slips to third and present tense to past. You only have a first draft; and, there can never be enough conjunctions to connect us to the things of this world. In the stacks I've stashed your obit. I pencil out your name. |