I slept from two to ten, which might be exactly what I am supposed to do.

I woke in a mood that was elevated just a little. I noticed it because I posed while I pissed, danced while I poured.

The sudden felt evidence of elevation was so strange! I really felt happy for once and it surprised me like an old friend dropping in out of the blue. I’ve been such a serious boy for so long. Years on end.

I’ve felt pleasure, but not the lifting of spirit that comes with the contentment of being bright awake, alive to the sun. Today I did.

Maybe it’s true that the purpose of life is just to feel happiness this way. I could believe that.

There’s been nobody calling me up for favors

In the last couple of months, when people who love me have asked me how I am really, I’ve said that I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

Speaking as a poet, I think
i feel
that it wasn’t happiness so much as
Relief
(until Now)
i’ve been relieved from duty to bosses
but not relieved from that sense of duty

Grimly, I erected the shed; dogged, I chopped and stacked the trees as if in solemn sacrifice.

No one’s future to decide
Except my own, and although that was a relief, it hung as a heavy relief.

What the hell are you going to do, death is looming

For one thing, I showered more this week than I usually have in a month, or two. I got clean, even if not yet in the unaddicted sense, even in the absence of a tub of bath.

For another, just before going to bed, I listened to a few hours of bright, pretty, smart people in their thirties, talking mostly about something other than politics–something that doesn’t much Matter.

For a third, and this is strange but true, I’ve been feeling the heat of running up against the edge of running out of money, not in any ultimate sense, but just in the sense of having ready cash easily available right now at the press of a button, and that was enough.

Enough to make me feel younger, as if in my thirties too, twenties even.

I was so very much poorer then, and yet feeling that posing dancing happiness was routine.

It makes no logical sense, but somehow being up against it put me back into the ancient space where both poverty and lifted spirits were part of everyday life.

You make me feel like I am young again

I’m sitting on a bus bench at the foot of one of the seven steel bridges across the one deep river. I have no collegiate degrees, but I have a notebook in my hand, and I think I want to be a journalist, because that’s how writers make money. I have nothing, but I have blind artistic ambitions. I write in the notebook just like I write into this one, except this a young Wide World without a Web. I write with a pen of flame.

For thirty years beyond that point even as the web blossomed the world just kept getting narrower. Finally it all just crashed and burned.

I rose from the wreckage landing on my feet and then it all just crashed again, and then again.

The third time I let go of ambition and gave in to relief. Thank God it’s over, thank the god that never existed that I don’t have to go back into the hellhole where he died for my sins.

I looked around me and saw that I needed to cut the branches out of the wires, so I did it. Months passed this way in numb relief.

I woke at ten and tested my limbs. Nothing, apparently, was permanently broken.

I danced. I made coffee and sang to the cats I found lying in the sunshine of the big sliding window.

Gazing out the big sliding window I watch the freight moving past fast over silver rails under a slate blue winter sky.