I am ever plagued by financial worries, ever impecunious, and these thoughts fester like boils on the skin of my well-being, and bring me to such a low state, that I don't open eyes into a new day, without - but here, I can't now write it down, in good conscience, knowing this selfsame thought has been expressed before, and to such a high degree of poetry, as would put my words to sorry shame. Actually 'twas rapp'd, by the great philosopher-gangster, Snoop Dogg, thus:

"My mind on my money and
my money on my mind."

In such fashion could he turn a phrase, easier than a rotisserie a chicken, and with more delicious results therein. He supplies me thus, with such a pretty syllogism, and of such sound structure, as ever the soul of wit could want of brevity.
I'm inclined therefore, if it weren't for my above-mentioned pennilessness, to go off and purchase a hat, or borrow one from a neighbor, for the sole purpose of, once donning it, immediately doffing it in salute to Mr. Dogg.
Anyway, I salute you! A thousand times over! And while bowing low, under strain and exertion of genuflection, beg forgiveness for having invited your poetry into such a dim room as my meagre light can furnish. Nevertheless! I shall beggar myself before treating it as anything less than royalty.
- Here, my back for a footrest -
- My saliva for a shoe-shine -
- The power of my lungs to keep thy rims spinning -

Eight million Tesla-coil hearts, flailing electric blue arms, blindly searching the boundaries of their enclosures... but I am concerned with two here... yours and mine, and the way all those violent blue bolts gather calmly where your skin meets the glass, then explode in renewed frenzy when your touch recedes.

I go out to smoke a cigarette, standing with bare arms in the snow. I cup my hand around the lighter's weak flame. A snowflake falls on my index finger as I'm looking at the fire so close to my skin, and for a moment my senses tangle and I'm convinced the snowflake has burnt me... That is an instance of the immaculate, liberated present, during which there is no possible future or past. I would sustain it. I would sustain us.

darling i wander
and wandering, grow fonder
in fondness i flounder
and floundering, i wonder
in wonder i squander
in squandering, no blunder
and blundering, come out -
yonder’s my understanding
standing, i ponder
and pondering, grow fonder
darling i wander

I lost the city. The city lost me - lost track of me. The streets were gripped in a grim winter rictus, pinched, constricted, frozen at the bottom end of exhalation - dead and breathless, at the very bottom of outward breath. Cement, marble, glass, rubber, steam, I saw everything disconnected from the rest, piled up in accidental arrangement. People strewn about in maudlin aspects of loneliness and suffering, happy people lonely, suffering, tossed down by an indifferent God playing at jacks with a million insignificant fates. I was lost. I was cold. I was small and mean inside my coat. Two pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks soaked through with turgid run-off from blackened heaps of snow - heaps like inverted graves on every corner. I moved through the streets, I was zero, I walked among the rotted frost-bitten feet of skyscrapers whose uppermost corners scraped ice out of the atmosphere by holding fast against the brutal plowing wind. Birds backed into filthy crevices with heads shoved deep under shivering wings. Wide fantastic emptiness spilled into me from above. Swirled inside me, marbled my darkness with a deeper black. There developed within a sinister hardening mucus of desperation. Empty desolation that urged me darker, if only to save myself from the sick and intermittent hoisting light.

Wanda is taking laps around the room, her evening constitutional. Upon each knick-knack (we call the room "the museum") which she's collected on her nocturnal scavengings she lays an inquisitive gaze, and sometimes a bold hand, if she has discovered a fitter place for it elsewhere. By the end of this exercise every object will have been relocated at least once. I am in the big devouring chair behind a copy of Topaz's "A Psychedelic History of Brazil" - his final and most critically panned novel. My eyes read the line "... in the house on the cliff beneath an asphyxiated sky she screamed at the top of her lungs for poor lost Geoffrey, though he sat beside her on The World's Most Uncomfortable Sofa," while Wanda prates on about Farineo's failing liver, how she cannot bear to have a dead ex-lover in her life. I, who spend much more time with Farineo than with Wanda, know that he really puts it on for her benefit, a sort of maudlin cirrhosis theater. He told me about pulling at the skin of his cheeks before meeting her at the cafe, to make himself more haggard and inflamed. I do not want to listen to Wanda but nor can I stand Topaz's contrived esoterica. I had made a fetish of his God-awful prose and derived a perverted satisfaction from lauding it to the disbelief of knowing Wanda and pretentious Farineo. Farineo especially got sore, as I still refuse to read a word of his writing, telling him instead it is enough for me to lie on the mattress in my room next to his and imagine the literary atrocities I hear forming to the muffled metronome of his hysterical typewriting. I picture horses circling a cobble-stone courtyard instead of his yellow fingers with their torn and dirty nails erratically groping the keys from which the letters and numbers long ago disappeared. Because when I see those fingers I see too Wanda's skin beneath them, a younger, less destroyed Wanda, whose past relations with Farineo have given me a sour retroactive jealousy. I sit very low in the chair listening to Wanda, not reading, just mentally saying the words to myself off the page, when a feeling of non-existence, of being flattened to a dull two-dimensional domesticity in which nothing has moved for thirty years and all the colors have forgotten themselves, causes me to begin reading aloud. Wanda does not stop circling or speaking. "Geoffrey, for his own part, had learned to disappear from himself, an act that left him feeling giddy with mischief, as if he'd tiptoed from the room while his wife dusted the mantelpiece with her back to him. Outside the window, which was over the cliff, through a precipitous four-square of unclouded blue, a dog barked, impossibly. So this is Brazil, so this is Brazil, Geoffrey thought as he winged away from himself and somersaulted into the pinched winter atmosphere. From that height out over the final jut of crumbling orange rock he mentally squeezed the shrubs that acned the valley floor a mile below." Oh, it is truly awful, it makes a grim rictus of my jaw, but Wanda begins to stutter and pause, so I keep on: "Flying like this, he let fall his ego like sandbags from a hot air balloon. His childhood memories dropped away to nothing, and he went higher. He arched his back in imitation of the sun's curve. He grinned into the slapping wind. He cried, vomited, and pissed into the blue... he tumbled away from his waste. Passing through a cloud, he filled his mouth with damp cotton. Oh, boy! But there weren't enough miles in the universe to put between him and himself, and all the while he remained umbilically attached. Suddenly his name came hurtling toward him, and he looked back at the widening speck of his wife approaching through the sky. She sort of ran through the air, dipping awkwardly, straining, struggling to keep her apron out of her face..."

"I don't know where I found this dream, I mean when and where it was born in me, but I see the face of a beautiful girl, dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look, or a look of dissatisfaction long sustained, a sentiment that arrived long ago and never left, one that used to be instrumental and advantageous, that must have seemed fashionable at first, then uniquely expressive of how she genuinely felt, and finally involuntary, something only others see. Because a look is just that, it doesn't come with any solutions. But it attracts. It attracts me. This is no doubt an adolescent fantasy, but I still have it, as time goes on it becomes more and more real, more heartbreaking, because I know I will never find it, and, even worse, I believe that I have found it before, maybe several times, but I could never forgive them their reality, as if I myself were anything else...! Yes, it's all so adolescent. This girl, I find her in a small town, or a less developed, more brutal and desperate city, while I'm traveling alone, me and a car and a little money, while traveling I don't speak to anybody for days, so I walk around with hot coffee in cold hands, stand in front of gas stations or in supermarket parking lots, and all of a sudden there's this girl, bundled up a little haphazardly, she's looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously, mistrustful, as I look at myself, inwardly. You can't imagine how many different scenarios I've come up with in which I collide with this girl, for the slow or sudden intertwining of our lives. I think everything I've written has been an elaboration on this fantasy. It's what keeps me moving forward in time. Like a carrot dangled... it may be, it probably is a phantom carrot, or just a mirage - that's a better metaphor - a hallucination born of thirst... but at times it seems so real to me, certainly more real than any... these scenarios, let me give you an example. I pull into a strange town at dawn, gliding in on an empty tank of gas. I find a gas station just as the engine starts to fail. I pull up next to a pump, but the station's not open yet. I get out of the car and gaze across the road at a thick, impenetrable bank of trees, the forest that's been rushing by all night. It's frigid in the dawn air, my breath comes out in blooms of frost, I rub my hands together, my heart is enormous and empty, but with a tiny spark of promise, like the sky and its distant suggestion of day, struggling like it has to invent the first day, and it's been working all night in secret trying to get it right... my heart, so many times wrestled to the ground and broken, yet has to invent the first love, having worked so often in secret to get it right. Everything up until now has been rehearsal... life is a perpetual rehearsal for the next moment. This is the curtain finally rising... and, having nailed life a thousand times in my dreams, out on reality's stage, I hear the board creak under my foot, the world performs a sickening pivot, and I forget all my lines... In front of the station's locked and shuttered door I find a bundle of the day's newspapers, but my hands are so cold and chapped, I've barely begun trying to work one free from the plastic tie when I give up... this is some intimation of Truth, of The Way Things Are, and the Story of My Life... that kind of thing... but the air, the temperature, everything is too immediate and demanding of presence... quiet, open, receptive presence, full attention, that I don't follow any thought too far away from myself where I stand steeped in this elegant dawn, being unfamiliar with oneself in an unfamiliar environment is like being locked in a room with somebody who for years you've only glimpsed from afar. I feel bare before myself, and look on at me looking on at the dawn, at my car, at the road that is so awkward in its stationary aspect, after driving all night, the way you see crows sort of hopping on the grass. I get back in my car and feel enormously, infinitely tired, I think of the strain we put, in our lifetimes, on this - alas! - temporarily self-renewing structure, which after all is far less sturdy than we think, which is why we build our fortresses of... I fall asleep. And what wakes me up is a soft tapping of knuckles on glass. The window has steamed over. I can't roll it down without turning on the car, so instead I open the door. She steps away, giving me room. She has dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look... she's looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously..."

"But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." Push, by Sapphire (aka "Precious", now a motion picture)

I spent the entire day wandering, walking up and down the streets of Brooklyn in the rain, and the not-rain, and the not-quite rain. I wore my jacket and a backpack, and I walked - walked everywhere. My feet were tired and then they weren't. My legs were numb and then they weren't. The sky was always gray, with sine waves and parabolas marking the darker clouds from the light, and sometimes the rain went sideways. I had my umbrella but I rarely used it, and all the time my glasses were covered in a light mist, or with big drops, and all the time I walked - I walked. I was at the Brooklyn Heights promenade staring out over the misty waters at the Statue of Liberty, which appeared tiny from such a distance, and as if she had her back turned on us. I was at a used bookshop in Dumbo, sitting on a low couch reading Jean Genet. I was in Greenpoint, munching a doughnut from Peter Pan and wandering along the waterfront. In Williamsburg at a vintage clothing store. Down Driggs, up Bedford, down Atlantic, up Front, left at this corner, right at this, and straight on till it feels right to turn. Now I'm back home, exhausted. I prepared two veggie burgers to the sound of rain coming down hard now - finally - and ate them in the unimaginable calm and comfort of my well-lighted room. A copy of "A Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet is waiting for me on my bed. Cats are meowing in the hall.

Day well spent.