Noah Cicero: Bipolar Cowboy

you need help.”

Noah said nothing.

The man tried putting his arm

around Noah, but Noah said

in a nervous voice, “Please

don’t touch me.”

The man with the brown teeth

said, “It isn’t that bad, it’ll get better soon.”

Noah responded,

“This is so horrible,

it doesn’t even seem real.”

The man with the brown teeth

looked into Noah’s eyes and said,

“It’ll be okay.”

Noah wanted to scream,

“But the pain is in my brain,

and I can’t escape

my own brain.”

The man went away,

walked back

to whatever filthy apartment he lived in.

Noah Cicero sat in his car,

with eyes so sad, he said,

“Am I really that sad?” He remembered

everyone who tried to help him

in the last six months, Bernice, John, Wanda,

Nicky, Sara, Haley, Cameron, Keegan, Mani,

Paulina, Asia, Dana, Samantha, etc., etc.

But nothing worked—

Noah was so fucked—

that Jesus personally had to send a guy

with brown teeth to notify him

the depression must end.

He put both hands on his temples,

and said, “Please stop,

please stop please stop

the noise.”

“Can’t you get a job using your degree”

“I’m sure you’ll get a job by the end

of next week”

“Have you tried Indeed.com”

“Have you tried convenience stores”

“Have you tried job fairs”

“Have you tried Facebook”

“Have you tried watching YouTube

tutorials on how to get a job”

Noah looks up and points at them—

pokes them in the chest—

God made me a poet—

God made Han Shan a poet,

He put Han Shan on Cold Mountain,

and he put me in this desert.

I’ve never asked any of you

to stop making money

to work less hard

For me to write

of Cold Mountain.

I must live there,

at all times.

On the summit, in the caves,

sleeping under the bristlecone pines,

because you can’t live

on Cold Mountain.

You have better things to do.

My job is to bring you water

from the melted snow

that makes its streams,

so when you need Cold Mountain

I’ll be there

to provide you with water.

But for right now,

leave me the fuck alone!

I’m on Cold Mountain

and I’ll come down

when the wind tells me to,

not because of

an ad on Craigslist!

You know that noise

Tina Turner makes

before she sings the chorus

of “What’s Love Got to Do With It”

I am that noise.

A pigeon running through

the Starbucks parking lot.

A small child walks over

and scares the pigeon.

My woman left me, but it has been

so long I can’t even complain anymore.

I tell myself because of her,

I am in the Las Vegas Welfare Office.

She is my favorite scapegoat. Take

an anti-anxiety pill and calm down, Noah.

The line starts at the door, I wait in line

for an hour, blacks, whites, Mexicans,

and even a few Asians. We all need

food, WICK or ObamaCare.

I need food. Desert poet has no food.

Everyone discusses

the death of the Ultimate Warrior,

a famous wrestler from the 90s.

I said I remembered seeing him wrestle

when I was a little kid. A black guy my age

said, “Yeah, we all remember.”

If the Ultimate Warrior is dead,

we all must die. Because he was

THE ULTIMATE.

The definition of ULTIMATE:

“the best achievable or imaginable of its kind.”

There is no music in the Welfare Office,

no pictures on the wall, only gray.

Two overweight security guards

making less than ten dollars an hour

yell at poor people all day

to stay in line, to wait their turn,

they took my coffee, there is a

no food and drink rule.

I finally get through the line,

then they tell me to sit, they will

call me to go to a room to meet

with a caseworker.

I sit in a chair next to

an old Mexican man

wearing a jogging suit

with a freshly shaved head.

Remembered my grandparents,

all of them died comfortable,

they never had to wear jogging suits

or go to welfare offices,

of course they were white.

The black people and Mexicans

don’t like seeing me in the Welfare Office.

If a white man with blue eyes

can’t get a job, what chance do they have?

After two hours I meet with a caseworker,

tired white woman, mid 30s. Dealing with

frustrated angry semi-crazy hungry poor people all day.

I said, “Did you hear the Ultimate Warrior died?”

She responded, “Did you know

the Ultimate Warrior could only breathe

the air of combat?”

She gets me an EBT card.

$189 party time!

Noah Cicero sent

the eight most horrible

text messages,

total cruelty,

hate mania!!!

To someone

who saved him, who for several years

made his life very interesting.

He had gratitude.

He told himself

he had to write the eight horrible texts.

It was the only way to ensure

there would never be contact again.

Why couldn’t he walk away peacefully?

Just be happy that he got to travel

the world with a beautiful woman,

be happy that a girl seven years younger

let him sleep with her, and on some days

even loved him.

After Noah Cicero wrote the horrible

text messages, the woman he wrote them to

began to disappear from his mind every day.

Noah’s family said, “It had to be done.”

blood had to be shed

Noah put the pictures away, he even

took the cute note she wrote from

the first year of their relationship

out of his wallet, he couldn’t throw it away,

no one expected him to.

He used to dream of a Murakami ending,

but now, even that was destroyed.

He took all the memories of her except one,

he considered all the other memories excess,

he threw the surplus memories away,

even the memories of when they first met,

he put them aside.

He focused now on a neutral memory,

of her standing at Angkor Wat in Cambodia,

in her blue jean dress, wearing her Marc Jacobs sunglasses,

they walked the walls touching the carvings,

together they watched a monkey drink from a bottle of water.

They had never seen a wild monkey before.

Of course he will love again,

of course he will accomplish more things,

of course he will grow old,

when no one is paying attention

he will say, “Wasn’t Cambodia beautiful?”

and she will say, “Yeah, I liked the happy pizza.”

And of course Noah Cicero will grow old and die,

and of course she will grow old and die.

There is a zen koan,

it goes

A student asked a zen master,

“I haven’t anything in my mind,

what should I do?”

Master said, “Throw it out.”

“But I haven’t anything in it.”

Master said, “Then carry it out.”

An old woman lived with Noah Cicero,

she wasn’t that old, she was only 63,

but she was dying of cirrhosis,

and looked 75.

She sat in the other room playing