Captions for a Picture Magazine: A Joan Didion Persona Poem-You are quite possibly impatient with me by now; I am talking, you want to say, about a "morality" so primitive that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good. Exactly. -Joan Didion, "On Morality"

I. You don't know. You weren't there. And furthermore, on this matter pardon my blitz of fragmentation and splices. There was a time, namely in the sixties, although the details escape me, when the world found something in dwelling in Sacramento. (I won't call it joy, or living) for none of us are ever really alive until Sacramento is in the rearview, and we're San Fernando Valley-bound. Hemingway once said something about loose words losing their edge, and despite my broken narrative, I could not agree more. Ironically I read that quote from a quarter-zine one evening when the broken world lost its zeal, and yesterday I recall the world set ablaze and needed to remove myself from this

process of pen-to-page, and so forth. II. And yet the story I have to tell of that broken world revolves in sentences and might go a bit astray, like this: "Why do we like those stories so?" So what? Recall the Titanic sinking beside Zelda Fitzgerald and the literati... out to get me, surely, as the sixties did, the guilt, the power, the inflection of the nineteenth century, and later Howard Hughes owns Nevada. Bastard. III. You don't know. You weren't there. And by that logic, shame on those who enjoyed The Panic in Needle Park because of what I did or didn't know about heroine. About drugs and the intoxication of co-writing. Venture to Broadway and 72nd Street

and I'll show a drug problem. At once I am reminded this letter is to reach the a voice of separation in the broken ship of dreams and golden freeways otherwise known as Californ-eye-aye. IV. There was the time I shot a sheriff...or ...maybe that was a Clapton song, but the timing fits. V. As it happens, I am committed to the language of the Self, and by the Self I surely mean the soul, and by language I surely mean my mastery of it. You must master the language before you can fuck it up. That is the problem with the world, with the hydroelectric power plants and nuclear disasters, with the drowning world and misdiagnoses

of mysterious nerve disorders (the ones so severe I may hardly remember my entry to this point...), with the armies of self-respect and damnation: They don't know. They weren't there. I know. I was there. I know I was there. VI. I have no crucifix in hand. I have no kindness or self-deception. I have no feminism or reminiscence of cause-and-effect relationships rewinding in my mind. Things begin to line-up, and I speak only through the clatter of typewriter keys and outside is a southern California five-pointer. In Sacramento we call earthquakes the results of compelling conversation. But this is no Sacramento. You know these ruminations to be true, you, the vague and unknown third party: So far, separated and rightfully so. Resistance is the color

of anxiety, of Citalopram and codeines and whiskey in a summer window overlooking a world of consumerism and my essay on going home. You don't know. You weren't there.