Captions for a Picture Magazine: A Joan Didion Persona Poem

-You are quite possibly impatient with me by now; I am

talking, you want to say, about a "morality" so primitive
that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its
point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good.
Exactly.

-Joan Didion, "On Morality"

I.

You don't know. You weren't there.

And furthermore, on this matter
pardon my blitz of fragmentation
and splices.
There was a time,
namely in the sixties, although

the details escape me,

when the world found something
in dwelling in Sacramento.
(I won't call it joy, or living)
for none of us are ever
really alive
until Sacramento
is in the rearview, and we're
San Fernando Valley-bound.

Hemingway once said

something about loose words
losing their edge,
and despite my broken
narrative, I could not agree
more. Ironically

I read that quote

from a quarter-zine

one evening when

the broken world lost
its zeal,
and yesterday

I recall the world set ablaze

and needed to remove
myself from this
 process

of pen-to-page, and
so forth.

II.

And yet the story I have

to tell of that
broken
world
revolves in sentences
and might go
a bit astray,
like this:

"Why do we like those stories so?"

So what?

Recall the Titanic sinking beside Zelda Fitzgerald

and the literati...
out to get me,

surely, as the sixties did,

the guilt, the power, the inflection

of the nineteenth century,
and later
Howard Hughes owns Nevada.

Bastard.

III.

You don't know. You weren't there.

And by that logic,
shame on those who
enjoyed The Panic in Needle Park
because of what I did
or didn't
know about heroine. About
drugs and the intoxication
of co-writing.

Venture to Broadway and 72nd Street

and I'll show a drug problem.

At once I am
reminded this letter
is to reach
the a voice of separation in

the broken ship

of dreams and golden
freeways
otherwise known as

Californ-eye-aye.

IV.

There was the time

I shot a
sheriff...or

...maybe that was

a Clapton song,
but the timing fits.

V.

As it happens, I am
committed to the
language
of the Self, and
by the Self I surely
mean the soul, and by
language I surely mean
my mastery of it.

You must master

the language before
you can fuck it up.

That is the problem

with the world, with
the hydroelectric
power plants and nuclear
disasters,
with the drowning
world and misdiagnoses
 of mysterious
nerve disorders (the
ones so severe I may hardly
remember my entry to
this point...),

with the armies of self-respect

and damnation:

They don't know. They weren't there.

I know. I was there.
I know I was there.

VI.

I have no crucifix in hand.

I have no kindness or self-deception.

I have no feminism or
reminiscence of cause-and-effect
relationships

rewinding in my mind.
Things begin to line-up, and

I speak only through the clatter

of typewriter keys and outside

is a southern California
five-pointer.

In Sacramento we call earthquakes

the results of
compelling conversation.

But this is no Sacramento.

You know these ruminations

to be true,
you,
the vague and unknown
third party:

So far, separated and rightfully so.

Resistance is the color

of anxiety,
of Citalopram and codeines and whiskey
in a summer window

overlooking a world
of consumerism and
my essay on going home.

You don't know. You weren't there.