Opium Cactus: ideas for my suicide note

1. remember to blame my mother


CATS--- leave food for


2. I am too desperately
sensitive
for this dreary mundain world
(mundane?)
(mondaine?)
(eff it--- just put dreary world)


life insurance
(get some)



(c) Nissa Annakindt


Poem #6 in Where the Opium Cactus Grows. This poem does not advocate or recommend the dreary mundane act of suicide, which can screw up your whole week. And Mom, this is a FICTIONAL poem by a FICTIONAL character, it's nothing about you. And if you're mad about the 'eff', hey it was worse in the first draft.

I gave my shrink a copy of my book at the start of our session yesterday, and I'm proud to report that I'm NOT blogging this from a rubber room. Most of the session was spent with the shrink reading my poems and asking about them. This is one of the poems he spent time on--- NOT that he thought I was suicidal. He actually got this poem--- perhaps in part because of the note printed at the bottom of the poem (reproduced above). The poem isn't really about suicide or even the writing of suicide notes. The character in the poem has only got to the point of jotting down a few ideas for a suicide note--- she's only contemplating suicide-note writing at this point. And if you haven't got the point about the 'life insurance/get some' thing, that's the huge hint I've thrown out that there is an optimistic ending to this poem. It's not about literal life insurance. More that the character has found a way to deal with her troubles--- preparing for a self-dramatizing suicide note that won't get written--- and therefore is not going to be in a situation where extreme acts such as suicide are even a remote possibility.

This is one of the older poems that I've written, during a rather upbeat phase of my writing life when I was writing poems every day, and quite a few of them came out of my head finished--- even after over a decade of living with the poems, I often didn't need to change a single word. (Still, I always put freshly-written poems in a file for a few months for later rewriting, if needed. Nowadays, they tend to need it.)