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.

Remonstrances sound in the pale evening gloom
One that is feared, a midnight rose' bloom.
Concealed by a thick, emerging wall
Cries never heard, dying off at her call.

Peering round the tombstone tree,
I see leaves swaying in the ominous breeze.
A foretelling of an unknown story
That has come to end, Grimm's morning glory.

Peeling off the gigantic red brick house,
Are cement and paint in cold dry blood.
Parting gazes deceive the spider
As the web tears apart for the cunning outsider.

Flickering and broken lamps unfixed
They cast light on the wicked, devouring mix
Of witches and grumps, different and alike
Who ruin our lives
And rip even knives.

A considerable vacation it must be
To head in and out, oh how much fun and glee!
But horror tales come undone only in the fall
When the glimmer wears off
And ink splatters the prison wall.

Bullet holes, wounds, hawks
The children, the water, hope
Lions, coins, families
The red prayer in a ladie's veil

I tend you under my thick skin
So the sad thief won't find you
Tall, strong, lonesome, handy
The world has been waiting for him
Who will have missed his shot
Calling himself powerful and proud
In the straits of the sirens
Eaten by the Gods

Because everything already happened
That's how it is and will be
I adopted a sick angel
At the day of my birth

The labor room, the lights, a sentence
Silence, midwives, stolen falsities
Advices, remonstrances, remorse
Redemption, sweat, giggle