Trouble

by Matthew Dickman August 11, 2008

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills

to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter

hung in the Tahitian bedroom

of her mother’s house,

while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes

you can look at the clouds or the trees

and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.

The performance artist Kathy Change

set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves

out of the music industry forever.

I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French

philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped

from an apartment window into the world

and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead

roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign

when everything looked black and white

and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway

put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho

while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree

and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened

thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body

until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like

the way geese sound above the river. I like

the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.

Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter

brought her roses when she was still alive,

and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite

in his own mouth

though it took six hours for him

to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned

and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are

travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially

on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died

in prison, naked, a bag

around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer

Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.

Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues

after drawing a hot bath,

in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.

Larry Walters became famous

for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled

weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet

and then he landed. He was a man who flew.

He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush

my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.

I want to be good to myself.