no more mornings
D.B. Cox

"another morning when he must do it again—there is always another morning"
... Ernest Hemingway

after you walked away
from all of those
car wrecks &
plane crashes

i was convinced
you were
indestructible
larger than life—

battles in italy
safaris in africa
fistfights in key west—
although, chances are

dorothy parker
could’ve kicked
the shit out of
wallace stevens

but when your
old powers
& old friends
started to fade

& you started
to measure each evening
by the whiskey
left in the bottle

& who wasn’t there
the unrelenting
depression
became overwhelming…

in a discarded
draft of your
nobel prize
acceptance speech

you wrote, “there
is no lonelier man
than the writer,
when he is writing;

if he has written well,
everything in him
has gone into the
writing, & he faces

another morning when
he must do it again—
there is always
another morning…”

one day in july
1961, you put
a 12 gauge shotgun
to your head

& since you never did
anything half-ass
touched off
both barrels

now you can rest
your arms on the ropes
ignore the bell
for the next round

the goddamn hammer
of the morning alarm
now irrelevant

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