DB Cox- A Poem

no more mornings
--- “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
it seemed you were indestructible
larger than life
battles in italy
safaris in africa
fistfights in key west

but when your old powers
& old friends began 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”

until one day in july, 1961
when you stopped the sun
with a 12 gauge shotgun
putting it to your head
& touching off both barrels

now you can rest
with your arms on the ropes
now you can ignore
the bell for the next round
the goddamn hammer
of the morning alarm
now irrelevant