I’d discovered something—something that explained thinking, as I had, a little, over the last couple days, about cigarettes.  I started writing songs that met my standard as to what a good song can be.  Now, i’ll probably never play a musical instrument since i spend so much time doing other things—but I’d played around […]

     the power hadn’t gone off yet—but I was in for another 20 hours of danger.  it was cold—getting outside to paint was going to take a little burst of will-power, but doing a painting was a priority.  How else was i going to spend my time?  Since, as it happens, i finished the first

     i was feeling a little on edge because there was supposed to be an ice-storm tonight and the power was expected to go out, possibly for a few days.  What in the world was I going to do with myself if the power went out?  could i sleep fourteen hours, write a little poetry,

11      i won’t reveal their codewords—but something had changed, this morning, when I was writing my various poems; the men i was using to sound out the consonants—my smoker friend, my stomach cancer uncle, and my scotch uncle all started doing the vowels, and Ursula started doing the consonants.  That meant I concentrated a

     you give yourself away, i guess  –  i mean when you’re unable to create, in part (probably), because you’re projecting a room full of women that each have their own appearance and identity.  That takes a lot of energy.  So there i was, projecting my future into an uncertain future, and, as such, into

     i moved directly into a four count when reading off my codewords.  are you trying to type with my voice?  “Yes, as best I can—with both of our voices, although mine is suppressed by the consonants—making room for another version of me to come in.”  then I thought, “what is trans-queer?  if I’m a

     My daughter was on the line again: hi, Dad; she was so excited.  She knew I was there as soon as I cracked a can of seltzer water, before I’d even had a chance to tell Ursula that I was on the line.  I was angry now with Hakeem Jeffries (i think i spelled

10      thinking of some Denmark woman that wrote a Denmark book in which an elder woman is hired to go through someone’s estate and they find out that they are their daughter—or something like that; anyhow, that was the thought that entered my mind.  I wondered, then: do I have a daughter ahead of

     what are you going to do with that?  “I’m going to publish it.”  Incidentally, i knew that Ursula would fiercely defend her boyfriend if she felt the need to do so.  So she might have been thinking about him when she was thinking of this book.  I felt the need to say, then, that

     it’s so exciting to be in love, to feel that you might, in fact, be the person that you’ve been dreaming of, and everything that went wrong in the past is time out of mind—or, if not, then vengeance is close at hand.  the vengeance part was a joke—i was beginning to catch on