Oreste Belletto

Oreste Belletto is 53, and living in San Francisco. He has a master’s in poetry from UC Davis. He has had poems published in Byline Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, The Lilliput Review, and nycbigcitylit.com, and has work pending publication from Zoetic Press, Eclectica Magazine, and Midway Journal.

Unused Spaces

I’ve been keeping an eye on the unused spaces
whenever I have to drive into town.
I live in town, so I mean into more town.
Mostly that means roofs
and other tops of things,
the upper side of bus stop glass.
And by driving into town I mean
picking up my prescription.
I parked looking out at sloughwater and marsh grass,
then highway right through it,
more sloughwater,
technically part of the bay. And I thought,
what an ugly place to kill yourself.
You have to mean it to do that here.
No one would be confused.
No one would think that maybe you had been wrapped in
some misguided but beautiful romantic bullshit
about how perfect suddenly one gesture could be.
It wouldn’t be a fucking gesture. Not here.
You’d just go and stick your face down.

And I cried.
From what I understand, that’s a good thing.
It’s worse if you don’t cry.
But it felt like hell.

I’ve been so tired and didn’t know it,
so when I ran out of pills I slept eighteen hours.
And then instead of anxiety at all hours
I only felt sad. It’s not good, only one emotion for long stretches of time.
So I slept some more, and when I woke up I called my psychiatrist.
And what I mean by that is I called a secretary.
The secretary called a nurse, and I talked to a nurse.
Later, a different secretary called
and said the doctor had left a prescription at the desk.

And this is how I was left on my own to decide not to stick my face into a marsh.