Sitting at an open door/open air space at about 11pm, thinking: Our time for late night open window places is running out for this two-thousand and eighth year of our Lord.
Amen, and pass the tonic water.
I noticed this afternoon that the picture I posted last week — that glorious picture of my glamorous visage in a bathroom mirror — is not the picture I thought I shot up. It appears I never took the picture handily showing me half-waving my right hand in a “See you next week” kinda way.
No big deal. I did not go far. “Underground” for me is my kitchen, where I sat on the oft-mopped floor with my stack of papers, trying to write something. Anything. I turned off this phone for most of the week, feeling far quieter inside without the mental noise of a potential intrusion. I turned off the Internet for much of the week, too, the irony there being that last week I set up the wireless and network stuff so I could connect to my 2+ terrabytes of FLAC files from anywhere.
Anywhere except the kitchen: my technology-free sanctuary for the week.
For a brief spell (hah, almost said ‘grief spell’) I looked into renting weekly rate rooms in Queens. There is an active market for this type of rental in Queens within proximity of the airports where flight attendants and other airline workers frequently need a bed and 4 walls for anywhere from a night to a week. The reputation of these flight attendant hostels is of insomnia and debauchery, with airline workers bedding high-flying passengers for the cost of the room (cheap!) and going on their respective merry ways the next day.
Anyway, I had thought about this for a while after a friend visited town and stayed at a church-owned boarding house on the upper east side. For $60 or so a night he got a closet sized room with a cot, a sink, and a mirror. It reminded me (like I need to be reminded) of Room 317 at the Parc Lincoln, the first room in New York where I stayed for any length of time. I remember that room because it was my beginning, my first step into reality after the cloisters of school and … well, mostly school.
My attitude toward college (and even high school) was to get it over with so I could get on with life. It was an obligation I signed up for in neither this nor a previous life.
As wretched a place as it was, I get nostalgic for Room 317. I do not get nostalgic for the place itself but for the place in time, that sense of virtually permanent anticipation that is Beginning. I need that now. Christ, I need that now.
I read a lot this week. I have troubles reading these days. Before my eyes printed words have always skated and skidded across the page, mostly running away before I catch them. That much is nothing new. My eyes now are fading, and I know it. With my fizzling eyesight dense prose passes me by like rainwater roaring down a gutter, but poetry I can see. Thick pages of text, dense and huddled masses of words (like this page, hah) look to me like sagebrush on spotted fields.
Poetry I can see.
I was about to say that poetry does not hog the page as does prose, but of course poetry gluttonously devours pages with more hunger than an encyclopedia. One single word will occupy a full page of poetry while hundreds such words would efficiently fill the same space.
Efficiency! But what efficiency? Is not the one word that says as much as 1000 words the most efficient of them all?
What am I talking about?
Let me re-phrase that:
On what matters do I rampantly prostelatize?
I am tired from this week. I have not slept for shit since last week. Each day I woke up feeling pale and ghastly, restless nights and sleepless mornings resulting in mornings of mental disembowelment which I studiously tried to overcome by pressing both feet square to the ground, both palms flat on the table.
But it felt like I had a third hand, a third leg (huh huh, uh huh), another anxiety-plagued extremity that needed to contribute to the manual placation, the artificial serenity.
I read Anne Sexton this week, remembering how muscular was her mind. It turned me on, not because her poetry was sexual (Anne’s sex poems failed as bad comedy to me this week) but because it dug holes in my mind, lighting things up better than sex ever has. She would have been a complicated fuck, more complicated even than I if that is possible, and (like me) usually not worth the effort. But for the coming eternity I can always let her fuck me off the page.
