That's my plan right now: plan
with no plan.
That's the only plan there is.

12/26

. I remembered blood when I looked down at the creeping veins across my wrist and hand. I looked at the other, and the jutting veins were there too.
. A salary. It determines a person's worth. I work this hard; and I built up this understanding for the world, my credentials; so I deserve this measure of money for the work in a day to buy food, my place to come home to, my clothing, health, and luxurious indulgences that include those just mentioned and more.
. Loneliness. Lone experience in this world--only exception are siamese twins connected at the brain--; loneliness and breathing.
. When a girl's/woman's hair is so incredibly tender, soft, and flowing, it's so beautiful I want to die in it, to hold her warmly to me. It's just hair: thousands of follicles of the scalp.
. The person is the actual person.

2/22

. Under this expressway, I feel as if those iron hooves of trucks gone by that shake and make the entire iron and cement slabs bounce, they make their music for me.
The sun crushes into my eye obliquely. What a giant the Manhattan Bridge--the brownstone Brooklyn Bridge farther in the distance--that sleeps, its torso from this side across to that, as ants and centipedes scurry across its convenient belly. I think that was the V train rumbling across.
. How many times I've sat, come to the edge of the world. Here, the whiffs of Chinatown blow past me out into the sea. The East River. The Atlantic Ocean.
My forehead is bare and is warm. The sun gives life to everything. And when it is not there, everything is lifeless and dreary. Those seagulls gather energy to dart in front of all this with the same sun. That's why they fly. The few living things that thrive on dark cold is cockroaches.
. Civilization. An antpile. Photography, technology, steel. A collective memory.

Man

college I kept my body in a constant fit: classes, life in my place taken care of and the constancy of the air where the windless cold drizzle snow icy sun ran straight through the nights into the next and the following and end; . . . . . . .come to think

high school and before whence I went out on my own, by my self to the solitary courts to shoot, and shoot, dribble that echo into my own forest's sounds, that training--for what I didn't know then--it was just instinctual, like growing up inevitable--and my body went from an untamed else-sufficent to my own, my possession, to take care of...

Since this move, it deteriorated. As was described aloud, and which I cannot ever forget immortalized that legendary image of myself, fasting somehow over weeks cutting myself to slices of pb&j, chicken & tomato soup when I was sick, and cereal and indulgent milk for breakfast until I stabilized myself in my own place. Since then, I have been cooking, eating more regularly my chinatown groceries in delegated portions that I fix for myself. I go out once in a while when friends do. Then the weather warmed; the blizzard cleared. A block and a turn were the Central Park paths, which I have grown to love: those twin days of that one weekend, I ran cross and across the park, I conquered it, and felt somehow deservedly, or more like that bit more worthily, some piece of this island called Manhattan; and goddam this place has loved me into its orphanage's own, if temporarily, but we'll see.

Kitty would be so unhappy

I can't figure what it was. I figure it was a frog--not "frog," you know the ones we have in the yard; "toad?"--toad, yeah. Not the big ones though, since she wouldn't have bothered with a bigger one. It must have been the babies of the toad, and they must have poison in them too, right? 'Cause she just passed out--like Auntie's dog did--under that tree: yeah, you know that tree where the front yard connects to the lawyer's house, at the front, the mango. Well next time we have another, I've been thinking, we're going to keep her indoors all time. Well, there's that doggy door; but once it gets fixed, I'm keeping it shut. No, it can't be just gotten rid of; it's not a part of the screen, it's built in, remember? What'dyou say? No, grandma found her. Grandma did. She found her, said she was just like sleeping. and they buried her before we got home. Yeah, grandma and grandpa buried themselves. Yeah, before I got home; I didn't get to see her.

*
*

Hey; no no, no it's okay, I'm was going to sleep. New York it's good eh? Hah hah ha. Good good. So you know kitty's dead... Oh, you know, you know. Yeah, I think it might have been a toad--oh yeah?, oh yeah you just spoke to ma eh? Yeah, it's too bad. It's nature! Hah hah ha. It's nature; 's what happens. Noooooo; you have to let out cats. Then how unhappy they will be to being indoors all of the days. Might 's'well be dead! Cat would be so unhappy. Yeah, we'll see; it's sad. So how's job? Okay, I'll go to sleep. Go sleep.

Man and Feline on Couch