When You Clean Up A

As The Shadows Assume Shapes I Fight The Slow Retreat Now My Once-promise Dwindling Dwindling Now Lighting New Cigarettes Pouring More Drinks It Has Been A Beautiful Fight Still Is.

I Feel Strangely Normal.

Thanksgiving. It Proved You Had Survived Another Year With Its Wars, Inflation, Unemployment, Smog, Presidents. It Was A Grand Neurotic Gathering Of Clans: Loud Drunks, Grandmothers, Sisters, Aunts, Screaming Children, Would-be Suicides. And Don't Forget Indigestion. I Wasn't Different From Anyone Else: There Sat The 18-pound Bird On My Sink, Dead, Plucked, Totally Disemboweled. Iris Would Roast It For Me.

I Tell You Such Fine Music Waits In The Shadows Of Hell.

That Moment - To This ... May Be Years In The Way They Measure, But It's Only One Sentence Back In My Mind - There Are So Many Days When Living Stops And Pulls Up And Sits And Waits Like A Train On The Rails. I Pass The Hotel At 8 And At 5; There Are Cats In The Alleys And Bottles And Bums, And I Look Up At The Window And Think, I No Longer Know Where You Are, And I Walk On And Wonder Where The Living Goes When It Stops.