Threes

In the mornings of the last three days
I got up and played my last three games
Now I plan to change my foolish ways
And realize that words are only names.

In the sunlight of the purple dawn
The rooster crows just as it’s always done
But I tell myself the past is gone
And my new life is today begun.

In the shadows of the ghastly night
Two people met to say their last goodbyes
One knowing and one known to sight
One haunting in two haunted eyes.

In the wreckage of three deadly dreams
In the blackened burning fields of Freud
In the trembling drunken doubts it seems
There are some worlds to hold, some to avoid.

In the mornings of the last three days
I got up and played my last three games
Now I plan to change my foolish ways
And realize that words are only names.

4 January 1971

NOTE: I am pretty sure I wrote this for a creative writing class in high school. This was actually intended as song lyrics, and I had the melody in my head. I only realized long afterward that I had unconsciously plagiarized the melody. It was boosted from an instrumental piece, “Grand Street,” off the LP Sonny Rollins Brass / Sonny Rollins Trio, which my uncle played almost daily all through my childhood, such that I evidently memorized the melody without realizing it. This is hardly a poetic masterpiece, but it shows something about how my mind worked as a teenager.