Monday Mourning Poetics

I was talking to a young lady I occasionally have dinner with the other day and I told her the story behind "Monday Mourning Poem", which is one of my more popular works.

I was in Venice Beach (Los Angeles) living blessedly alone. My divorce was over, I'd already been dumped by the Panther for the 2,623rd time, the Brigit fiasco (Part I) was over, Gracie and I had become an historical (and hysterical) past item and Karla had decided she wasn't what I wanted.

I was seeing, socially, a couple of female friends, but no actual relationships existed. I did have this one strange friendship with an extremely attractive (but young) lesbian named Ann, who had been begging to come stay with me ever since the last days of her lover, Kori, who died of AIDS just a few months before. I had told her a resounding "No", as she was needing to face her commitments and grow from them (historical irony, no?)...Kori had asked me, a few months before her death to look after "our princess" once she was gone, a fact that Ann would bring up whenever I was not of the mood to listen to her collect call soliloquies or help her deal with a problem.

I'm in bed (okay, futon) one Monday morning when my phone goes off at about 4 in the morning. I sleep with my phone inches from my head so that if someone needs to reach me in an emergency, I won't miss the call. And, at the time, I slept alone...

The first ring snaps my eyes open.

The second ring doesn't finish before I have grabbed the phone off the makeshift nightstand I'd constructed of a cardboard box and pulled it to my head, croaking a good morning.

A collect call. You should have seen my phone bill. And all of them from Mississippi. where Ann lived.

On the other end of the line was Ann, breathless and excited (the first time I'd heard her thus in six months). She just HAD to tell me that she was so sure that after Kori's death she'd never be able to love again, but there was this girl she'd met and she'd just spent the night having wild-mutant, hot-monkey lesbian sex with her and she was sure that this was the real thing and that she was so happy and could she borrow eight hundred dollars?

As I listened to this beautiful creature tell me about her sex life (and ask for money) I noticed a small ant crawling on the windowsill near to my futon, and for some reason or other, this snapped my focus into a different plane and the absurdity of it all became apparent to me...

After telling me all about her overnight encounter she got off the phone (I had a sense she was getting ready to head home from spending the night at her new sex toy's apartment). I lay there for a moment until I heard the familiar tapping on my attic door (inside my head), I had barely made it to the table to grab a pen when this came forth:

Monday Mourning Poem

the headstone of my bed
makes a metallic ring as I fling
one desperate arm to thwart the banshee
in the machine (my portable telephone
emitting the moan of prophecy
that there will be someone on the other end
who is having a bad day, whether they define it
as a bad day or not being irrelevant.)

and so it goes.

or rather, begins.

and if ever I needed ample evidence
of the malign (or at least cruel humoured)
nature of God..I need look no further
than at the ant that crawls across
my withered windowsill as a voice
too chipper for anything short of the death penalty
jerks the choke chain of my obliged pleasantries
as I listen while counting the carcasses
of last night's sheep, strewn across
the grey battlefield in which I sleep.

or rather slept.

a call is bad enough.
why does she always call collect?
or more to the point...
why do I always accept?
thud. ten more minutes. please?

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Kristina would call the tone of this work "sad". Anastacia would say this is just one more historical statement of the abuses I endured from the woman who would be my second wife.

Me, I smile whenever I read it, as I can step back and view the world as it is, without me at the center.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, have a great day. Tomorrow is my first ex-wife, Jan's, birthday. Happy Birthday, kiddo.