Where is my schoolboy?
Where is my bomber-jacketed
          sensate?
The articulate flyer,
The gray-eyed smiler,
The man of God?

The apartment hasn’t been cleaned for so long and has housed a depressive in it for the same length of time so that there is a glaze of slime-dirt on the floor, made of dried coffee, hot chocolate, maybe some **** or some spillage from a tube of steroid cream to treat an inflammation that never really goes.  The rate of ooze changes?.  Clean textiles are piled up on the floor, never having been folded, and mix here and there with *****: practical fatpants that make me look like a geologist and white-white cotton blankets that can be washed on HOT with lots of bleach that I purloined from some mentalhealthfacility.  The inbox is full of—is bristling with—remonstrances from Programs for the Nondoer—you haven’t filed, haven’t turnstiled, haven’t had your hologram chip assessed by central CENTRAL intelligence, what is wrong with you.  Upon stepping outside there is a beat during which I think maybe somewonder might swirl and buoy but no, just wethumid and *****, sidewalks cruddy and Haitians and quasi-Haitians muttering “taxitaxitaxi” in front of their Gypsy conveyances with their dubious certifications.  I should go for a ride in one, a dubious passenger for a dubious palanquin.  I tried the library but it was too hot and decrepit and too filled with Books For African-Americans, which always ****** me off; are only African-Americans going to read Wright or Douglass or Brooks?  Everyone is overrated, anyway, movies and theater and the moribund beat of commerce, and as the dangerous autos pass, sometimes not running you over, you can see morechange in the pockets of the shareholders of BeePee and Iacocca Coach-Wirx.  Any friendliness exhibited seems to contain an underovertone of  You’re Not Included Whiteboy White ****** Ghost *****, all archaic names I’ve been almost astounded to be called usually while balancing on tiptoe on some lurching, roaring dieselbus, grinding past off-off-off brand groceries that do a dubious business.  While making my police report I wink at a sevenyearold boy and I get a lustrous wink back butalas this is not enough to beat back those slurrycolored brainfazes.

Someone asked me for the best boy
The clearest-eyed, the quickest smile
The sweetest touch the heart most open
I didn't want to tell the truth

I didn't want to name your name
Todd, you boy of deepest promise
Todd, O sugar, honey, spark
Todd, who sleeps the purest sleep

The sleep of the guiltless man
Your heart a mansion so much space
You've enough love for the Keystone State
O Todd, and room enough for me.

it’s as if you were in an endless (and beginning-less) traffic jam. The road is cramped and narrow; there are tanker trucks slowly pouring black smoke into your car’s vents, you can’t hear your radio or car stereo because of the low RPM rumbling of cars and trucks and semis all around you; any act of kindness you commit, such as leaving space for some dented, banged-up machinething trying to merge, is immediately ruined by someone else, scampering into the space you had left, foreclosing the chance you had of feeling you were being kind? noble? anyway, no; you are both starving and nauseated at the same time, and your stomach hurts from both; there are no exits where you can get off escape this, even temporarily, even shabbily; there are just jersey barriers and grey vehicles covered with grime, it’s drizzling now, and your windshield wipers don’t really work, they scratch and smear the grime across your windshield with a piercing, repetitive shriek, and when you try to look to your left or your right to see something besides damp, gritty, gray, fumy highway, the most you can see are the oblique outlines of institutions that could be factories covered in graffiti and litter and ragged advertisements for products not even sold any more, but you do realize that the space between you and the car in front of you seems a little greater, now, how? and you look in your rearview mirror and see that the car behind you is no longer looming, but instead is a spacing back, is not filling the view of the mirror, and as you cautiously press down on the accelerator, glancing to the left and right, afraid of what you might see, the cars move faster and are now farther apart; you press the WASH button and you’re going fast enough that the blue fluid sprays delightfully across the windshield, and the wiper blades automatically activate and clear it all, smooth and clean and fast, and is that sun? you now see greater distances, you see before you a world full of light and shadow, the sedan purring smoothly at the right speed. Things flash delightfully by, the car thrums, you can feel, in the center of you, that moving-forward feeling of progress, progress, progress. How could it be that just moments ago you were in a trench of grime and shuffling? Those trucks that were so sinister are now shinybright and obligingly staying to the right, their engines working better too, the sun glinting off their carefully custom-machined grilles; there are some curves and dips in the road that you follow with precision; there are grass and trees and the possibility of exits; even the paint on the road is whiter, and the road itself is blacker, and as you fly along you remember why you took this trip in the first place.

That's what it's like :')