Failure To Attend

when you swallow
a bottle of pills
and you feel them
begin to take hold

 it is possible to have a second thought
it is possible to think maybe I was hasty
and...
that
dizziness
and the tingle
grow stronger

and consciousness
begins to
transform
into
a
greasy rope

it is possible to assemble the ideas
together and motivate your brain
to regret,
not the past,

but the exact moment
you're swimming in

as the realm of light
becomes dimmer through
half open eyes

and
my
hiding spot
next to my
childhood home
became
an awfully poetic
place to

decide
to
abandon
a very foolish
(no longer twinkling)
conclusion

so I sent a text

a car arrived
as I stumbled to
the driveway

and there my memory
becomes intermittent
for a bit

I remember a step;
I remember a dashboard;
traffic;

a voice saying,
"Ted, don't go to sleep"

I remember telling a nurse,
"I changed my mind"

BLACK CHARCOAL
LIKE BURNT MUD
SUCKED THICK
through the straw

you feel it lining the grooves between teeth
and the backsides beneath tongue

SO BLACK
SO REPULSIVE
YOU JUST WANT TO REJECT
you just want to vomit on your lap

so,
you gag

"Ted, you have to drink it all"

you stiff the gag
you have no choice
you suck
it in
and it licks your throat

you gag again,
some comes up,
and you swallow that back down

it takes so long

when you finally lay back
you feel ashamed

black grainy fluid dripped
over lip,
down chin

like you've been slurping
from a sewer pipe

an officer came grinning
beside the gurney


 and I just asked him, "Please, before we go away, let
me
have
just one cigarette."

but no,
not even a suicide attempt
is enough to grant
such a kernel of kindness

when you swallow
a bottle of pills
and begin to feel
them take hold

it is possible to have a second thought

but even so

the nurse called my father
and I lacked the
importance for him to appear
-----------------------------------------------------------
An original poem by my friend Ted Vanderveldt,
 published on Facebook, 9-22-13                                       

Blue Plaid Memories

 



I'm going through old photos and I come across this one of me in the third grade, shortly before I got my first pair of glasses.  The photo was taken on Christmas day, 1970, in the house on East First Street in Edmond where we lived until the summer of 1973.  I'm sitting at the desk that my Dad refinished for me, working on a model of a souped up 1911 fire engine called the Firecracker by Monogram.  I had begged my parents' to get me that particular model for Christmas for weeks.  That year, for some reason, we had celebrated Christmas on the evening of the 24th, so I didn't get to start building the model till the next day.  I still have that model in the china cabinet in my dining room.  The antique globe sitting on the desk is also in my dining room, on top of the china cabinet, and the desk itself is at my parents' house.
    Other things in the room also bring back some rather random memories.  My mother made the curtains.  My Dad had laid the orange carpet squares as part of the process of remodeling the house into a quadraplex.  That orange thing with the black handle next to the desk is the Sears typewriter with the snap on cover that I had gotten for my eighth birthday the previous summer, and the turquoisey container I was using for a trash can was actually a Lucerne potato chip canister from Safeway.  I loved that belt I was wearing, and was disappointed when I outgrew it.
    But what stands out to me now are the pants that matched the curtains, and the bulletin board full of pictures of Donnie Osmond.  How is it possible that no one knew I was gay?