black and gray and yellow

It started at a bad time; it started late, when I stuck a piece of gum into my mouth and I headed out the already open door.

Hoping that there’d be by now a fire in my belly, which I have by now quite filled with

thick peasant bread

in preparation for starry nights that are always colder in their clarity, and more beautiful, and so much meaner to ungloved hands, my hands, that guide me down a page foolish blind; that page I cannot see. Numbed hands, bumbling touch, touch numbed by the rising air off the glacier melted where I stand.

Crossing the street to get to this night place, belly girdled with plain, dark peasant bread

(that is so good, too good soaked in cheap stew)

a dog rustled behind a fence, and I heard him, rustling, and I heard in my mind, “it is a dog rustling and he will come out”

but this did not stop the shock of his ghost white face looming at me, and did not muffle his machine bark.

BUT NONSENSE! My ears have been numbed and plugged with cold, and I cannot hear anything.

Nothing—like when I imagine the trees that rattle in the wind and shaking the clear cold comes running down them like rain—walked into the woods, and now can’t see. The moon is hid by the showering cold and the leaves. I drip with a shiver. Wanted to, would have told all about the water, and the city lights on it, the oil spills, and how so vivid they were I expected ducks to crawl out coated in light and sticky golden threads. But they were clean and all very sleepy.

the light from the fires never reaches me, rubbery and stopping at land and never reaching my feet

BUT the tide got up and left and trailed out like a slug, while all around my bench the mud flats rose thickly with a thousand trapped and dying things and smelling of sulfur. If I enjoyed disgusting scenes, I would enjoy these.

We are all soluble little bits draining into Donne’s oceans.

1,000 miles away a car aims its headlights at me from the summit of a mountain across the muddy gorge.

there’s a pirate plank pushed out into the flats, but all across them echo the hoots of gulls and the sights of black forest walls like fence posts with dogs behind them.

a landscape too medieval, washed in gray dyes. Gray browns?

My eyes are numbed and cannot see. Like I am, and into the woods again.

Where did I go?

i hardly remember

i remember city lights telling me where the earth spun,

so i followed them meekly, less courageous than the dog behind any of those black rising fences.

i moved, and thought of where i was, and began to think; and the more i thought, the more i missed and regretted the gum in my mouth and the door that was open

And I became sullen and moody.

Traveling and roaming I am silly and slight in this life, running to jump, but never leap;

Success in Circuit does NOT lie.

succes in Circuit does NOT lie.

succe in Circuit does NOT lie.

succ in Circuit does NOT lie.

Succor in Circuit does NOT lie.

I don’t see people, I can’t see faces. A familiar girl taps me on the shoulder and I push past her. Dreams and filth. I cannot see, cannot see

the world is a stranger

I am draining to a place—I am seeing one, a long watery line broken in ripples—from here to home.

Home finally?

What is home? But I am not there wrapped in linens.

if home were Burma I would be wrapped in linens. or Siberia. Lenin’s linens; but I am not THERE. A street up a hill and a sign and a street still declining is not home and that I why I went there, so why obsess over what I fled? Why even after I have run out?

I cannot press Home out of my eyes and ears and numbed fingers.

I reach into my pocket too cold to feel my pen leaking

A bus driver

has seen me two, three, four times.

I can’t care. Shameless.

A bus driver

has seen me three, four, five times.

I’m so disgusting.

Is this it? I fled to a jaundiced world! Jaundiced night world, full of repulsive night men, night women, unclean and NONE of them in LINEN SOFT. Night men night women did I flee to YOU?

really? a boy who is not home is on the bus seat in front of me and is sick. he is sick, he is he.

Stop coughing! stop coughing! stop coughing! stop!

Black and gray and yellow, i am walking in these.

distortion beats are bringing the branches alive, every leaf a bent note, about every tree; and me, rolling up a hill where each step brings me closer to heaven, while I sink down to hell.

things blocking light are changing yellow streets into some kaleidoscope fantasy. transparent wonders that could be shadows.

It’s not real. These must be the scenes people write about.

such as, roadside lettuces at midnight.

such as, another dog, a pearl in the night, his legs trotting cartoon slideshows.

flick, whip, forward midnight motion.

Rounding the corner home has never felt so sane, and so stupid.

The family is back. I do not read, no think, no do the things I should do. I head for the linens; I get to bed, get to bed, get to bed.