a rainy september evening, in a state school in new york


This hallway is stale tiling and drywall, it is a bitter yellow pill dissolving into milky powder on my tongue. The nurse tells me, I have to take it today. If I won't take it tomorrow, the nurse will have to talk to my parents.

My fingers are long and bear decent nails. They have been compared to spider legs and claws, as well as objects of great sexual desire, like little lions' tails.

Reflections are everywhere; they are just like patterns.

I like my steel-toed boots more than my paratrooper zip-up boots; the former are newer and haven't been broken in. They are big, stiff, and waterproofed. They feel like a suit a size too small; but nonetheless, it is a perfect fit.

I like my suit a size too small; it was brought to college on my last venture home.

Why are there so many people in this hallway, who will not ask me what my name is? It is like they are trees, and I am walking though them. Why will they not ask what I do in their territory?

Zip-up boots are pretty safe, but I must remember to keep my fly up when not wearing underwear.

"Don't drink or eat anything that tastes good," said I to myself, "else you shall be malnourished." Why must I always be so strict in commanding myself?

A house without doors is like a lover without eyes. How did yours get so beautiful?

How can two lovers grow apart so far? It is like a dream I had, it is like tears and dreams lost on a bleak highway. There are mirages, there is dry dusty sand, scraped off scruffily by the windshield wipers, constructed to handle an entirely different element of nature. Maybe they will be diluted again with one another, like the sea, like aleph; maybe they will solute. But this is so far from reality.

Why don't any of the tiles on this floor fail to match up? The tiles in my mind are of all different shapes and patters. None of them match up, not like these ones do. But these tiles are much blander, I suppose. I don't know which I prefer.

Normality or glamour? What is glamour? I think I'd rather be poor and dead. Money is the king, I am the messenger.

Music is hiding in all different wavelengths, it is harsh like a knife but steady like a rolling pin, and hiding all sorts of porcelain nicknacks behind it's masked corning of kitchen cabinets. What the function of this arsenal of culinary manipulators is exactly, is left unknown. It is kitsch and inspiration and lost, disguised behind its function.

What is my homework? Do I have homework? Is it still January?

Why are there so many plants running around this hallway? Are they that desperate to find out what their functions are? I don't remember their names.

I was never good with identifying plants out in the wild.