And then I wrote this poem to Ramona:
It’s never a fair man
Who keeps his woman & also
The ugly ones on the side
I had plenty of regret for my transgression, but like my knowledge of rods and furlongs, short was my wisdom concerning the basis of my lustful variations...but I had no particular idea how to circumvent this grief and guilt that seemed to accompany any enchanted pueblo mission of desire...at least for that set of moments, because Sharpe was gone, it could rest.
I can’t swear to anything that occurred during the next few weeks for I was living in the belly of the whale. There was a recondite beauty to this, for I saw boredom and my sitting and their adventure of ideas...I saw my mother day and night and I saw ten versions of the Green Flash...the sheets and towels and clothes we soiled flapped in the tropic breeze outside my window...I wrote poems at the dining room table for a few hours a day, nux vomica in hand...I drank Coca Cola and Belikan...I thought about Ramona and I practiced masturbation...the mystery, the intrigue, was a forever moving target...”the universe is a lady,/holding within her the unborn light.” I picked up books wherever I could find them...my mother had done a random job on the folks numerous books when she left the house on sugarloaf, and I was a bit surprised to find the likes of Erich Fromm and ee cummings amongst romance novels. I dug into these with a torrid abandon...Fromm was a good bridge, looking back, because he wrote about the neurotic little boy clung to the mother whose later love relationships were sloth by the bolt...
For the first time in my life I was ready to make a real sacrifice...and I don’t mean a compromise but real sacrificial offerings placed on an altar during the full harvest moon, under the duress of double indemnity and a life not quite lost on a train, with viles of songbird blood and the beheading of blank sonnets...I’m talking about looking deep inside and asking questions that ring like death penny bells in the mind’s eye...Why am I so torrid? Why do I suffer so at the hands of the beauty? Why did I fear losing my parents, esp. my mother at night? Is it normal to see red? I vowed to do something for the first time in my life..I sat and gave away the matriarch....I prayed for help in curing me of walking leisurely and casually into bad love relationships with mother-subs...I began to think ‘one more’ despite knowing I was going to have to see Ramona to the end of the line, and maybe that stop was the graveyard...a seaside Ecuadorian beach cemetery with doctrines of meditation and antagonistic schools of scholars ready to deconstruct my pathos......I was ready to get fixed...And so I wrote the greatest poem of my first 31 years during a week when my mother returned to Texas to see her parents…
I was sleeping alone in the ceiling-less house and waking up to the ocean and off-shore breeze with no Ramona and not a shred of evidence that she would pass before me again...that Monday was the first day forward of the rest of my life...dreams were coming powerful to me and I recorded them detail by detail in my journal...which I then boiled down to the root causes and wrote in bold all caps FEAR PRIDE ANGER JEALOUSY LUST AVARICE GUILT SHAME ...some life it was turning out to be ...something had shifted deep inside with the physical departure of my mother, and when I let her go in the mind, there was change singing in the electricity in the walls, mezzotint messages pierced my hangovers from drinking with Said and Kris and I had the old magic poesy going for my days...I ran, that is I took runs down the beach in nothing but a pair of shorts with a Russian Sun beating down upon my skin and the patient Polish breeze fanning my radiator, keeping the body’s engine just cool enough...I thought of Ramona when I passed Ramones, that time I had come upon her in that first of our three days together...I looked out across the ocean towards Belize and sent my thoughts to her, sustained in my determination by fatigue and fear of science and logic, which were always telling me to study the mechanics of happiness ...but I wanted to study suffering and I ceded my vainglorious homage runs to Ramona...some naked ideas that kept me out there for half hours until I could take the heat and athsma no more and would head in for a shower or out for a dip in the sea...Shaking my hair dry after the water thinking “today is the greatest...” with giant waves of heavy guitar panning across the horizon. As a matter of fact, I was alone. But I didn’t care.
-Michael Price
