This is the last of The Drowning Man Poems. The panic is over. The drowning is over. The transformation is complete. This is as confessional as I get. I look in the mirror and see myself for what I’ve become: an emotional vampire. B. often hurt. I got to act as comforter and confidante. I got to feed off her. Call it inspiration if you like. I think that’s too pretty a word.

I’d noticed this detachment before, the way a side of me (the writer within) would step to the side and observe events dispassionately, taking notes; everyone’s fodder. If someone died he’d get excited. He’d get to watch all the lost and grief-stricken friends and relatives for something he could turn into poetry as if only poetry mattered.

The best I can compare it to would be the delight a resident might feel on learning that someone had come into the ER with some ghastly condition or injury because they get to a) witness it first hand and maybe b) wangle a way on the team that gets to treat it. I imagine journalists must feel much the same when they learn of some natural or human disaster.