I feel as though heaven lay close upon the earth
and I between them both,
breathing through the eye of a needle.
-amr ibn al-as

le monde autour de moi cet après-midi: on était huit dans le café, et la lumière qui jaillit dans la salle est parfait. personne n'arrete de parler, travailler, ou boire. mais nous savons, tous.

after the cross-word puzzle, i cross words some more. it's all gibberish. why why why does it matter, does it matter to me? it could. dulled down day, both eyes half shut against everything. the farmer's market feels lonely, no jostling crowds, no anarco-folk bands. zack makes me try a weird green fruit, doesn't let me pay for my groceries. it's a small gesture, but i still feel like crying on the way home. two ladies are smoking on the benches over mission street, one of them likes my hair, one of them likes my beets. i'm clutching them in my fist like a child. it's a solid grip, it has no finesse, it's a broad chest, it's no nonsense. up front. my beets. my hand. thanks, zack.

sometimes i want to be in the city so that i know what i'm about. a place where every step has to know where it's going. a place of doing rather than planning. no more pretend life, no more book life, no more screen life. no more fold it up, origami life. sometimes, i want to be nowhere, coated in dirt, at the base of a rock that shits on the horizon.

two weeks to fold up my origami life. pull out the stakes. throw out the garbage. tie up the ends.

italy, 2008
the 3:26am train is
stuttering through the fallow land
in the gray pre-dawn, and it's
glacial in the unheated compartment.
i mime conversation
with two slovenian men
who drink non-alcoholic beer and later
shoo off the transients
while i sleep.

in bologna,
i am out of money
and do not know vanessa's address.
two men try to sell me drugs,
little pills i don't recognize.
they ask me for sex.
offer a hotel room.
try to take my bag.
cazzo fotteto,
they retreat into the night.

her grandmother died
in a white room,
like most people die.
bad luck.

i find her apartment
with no wrong turns,
with my footfalls ringing like
dampered bells under the porticoes,
the only sound to counter
white rooms and other darknesses.