Midwinter night,
     Clark & Halstead brushed with this week’s snow
     grill lights blinking at the corner

I like breathing better than work
but strange is the meat
when it is yanked out of the sky

The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach
Eye-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all

A thin brown stain 
down the white brick wall 
I guess yes 

The sky is pitiless. I beg
your pardon? OK then
the sky is pitted. The yard

twas the night before Columbus Day, ’70
and the humidity gave a semblance
of warmth to a day not unchilly, even somewhat clammy.

Then I do not know what
to paste next in the
Trash Book: grass, pretending

an orange devours
the crusts of clouds and you,
getting up, put on

              a box          a camera with a one-track mind

behind it

                 can’t see too good

I walk around with no ideals or goals. I pass ripe blackberry bushes.

There’s a man in me who would prove. He is right but little else. My knowledge of people was built up somewhere else. It was a heavy-handed preparation and it dies hard.

I blew money. I lost things. I got over the loud thing for awhile. Loud or quiet is about the same. It means you don’t have anything to come on to people with. And you have to give up first.