2006-02-09 - 1:18 a.m.
a sleeping jeff on my floor.
sadness, anger, a cigarette smell, are all coated in mute muscular air, a larcenous sheen of dull grey that makes me wish I could be close to breaking again. breathing in pain and shattering again. now that everything is smooth and hovering next to itself like my lip over the first coffee cup, the trembling almost touching, hot and bitter and sweet a bit ragged and bloody where the lip was chewed and the factorymade porcelain exerting it's heat and magnetic pain, but the raw skinless lip doesn't touch the scalding liquid. then it does. and this is just one of the many lovely things that cloud my view of the madness, porno vs. techno from the next door neighbors and a whimpering dog apartment 301 neighbors neighbors
pour beer on it
a chuckling shuffling certainty I'll have either breakfast or lunch tomorrow, I'll walk down and up the steepest street, it's a straight shot from here to the art school, from here to the ocean. a list of things to do written on a napkin. a way to navigate while still sleeping. to draw clouds out into thoughts and panhandle the panhandlers, cigarettes are rolies or tailoreds, tailoreds worth more and don't bum smokes from the crack dealers they aint got TIME for that shit but if you just follow the traffic lights east off polk st. you'll walk into a liquor store sidewalk where they don't mind if you sit in the chairs out front and drink your tall cans with the musicians who live under a tree and you can drum on a table and chair to punctuate their music that is a story about those who never learned to love money. it's in black and white and many of the people in it have beards. and then the rest of the way you wonder, have you thought enough about architecture? is the shape in your bathroom wall that looks like one of the ghosts from pac man architecture? is our rectangularity a psychosis? is that a valid question? is burning man architecture? can we wonder if we lived in circular buildings would we be peaceful? or at least better cooks? my beard might grow faster if I had a job. I'm part of history now. the long history of the unemployed on this block, in this town, in this room where swat teams have been, in this part of town where crack and smack are the salt and pepper and the food is well seasoned. my window faces a wall- and instead of thinking it's claustrophobic or depressing I like it. maybe because ever since I can remember I've imagined secret chambers under parking lots, buried deep in hillsides or just hidden up inside a cloud like some bonus level in a mario brothers game, and this apartment feels like that. wrapped deep in san franciscos warmth and concrete, encircled by the efforts of carpenters long past, plumbers and electricians whose handywork now quenches my thirst and carries these words away from my fingers, I could be any where. and the night could be a space for you to move through towards me, or me towards you. though I'm grateful for this space and peace. some days I walk miles through the city or take the train to it's ends. and some days I go no further than the corner store. once I didn't speak a word for three days. I memorized the liquor stores, rolled out on the tongues of pavement, found the undulating city in its own pocket, forged across the windy stink breath, made it into myself and exhaled its flowers, decay no different from growth, albums of time, layers, sedimentary, growing for no particular reason, making salad of significance and graffiti. the madness of the mad may be contagious. for the most part the street sleepers are kind, either religiously or through protracted observance of absurdity deprived of care for much other than whether it is nice out or they possess the chemical of their choice or a couple of bucks for a sandwich. but I live in a box, i'm buried in the mushy past like oatmeal or no wait quicksand, a frustrating inability to see the history of these walls and this sickly self made mugshot reveals only that I make better potatoes and a worse drunk than I used to.
