I walked 10 miles today in the spring

So – On about some realness. And it’s Monday night, at midnight. I’m at Public Square. Across the street at the casino there are sportsfan looking douchebags standing around smoking. A beat looking guy strides on up to a cop – strides on – he goes to the cop car like no person does who isn’t himself a cop. He talks through the window a minute and I’m paying a little attention while I smoke & watch the ancient church & the casino patrons across the way who just seem like another team, another side in a war. The man staggers off – a drunk cop act. Not fooling anyone, he staggers like he shit his pants. I palm my cigarette & do not smoke while a man walks past with a covered stroller – trying to be right by little babies that have to be downtown at midnight. I try and not notice the old lady with her pants around her ankles leaning up against the Moses Cleaveland statue to pee. The secret cop goes over under the war memorial where the stroller-man has gone to stand around with some people who are sparking up a joint. Everyone waiting on the bus in the shadows of the big bank buildings – we all mutter, a little, “Cop” and ears trained to know murmurs are furtive.

The healthline comes around the corner – the articulated bus with the accordion middle. Shiela – who’s angry and sweet, who stands with me in the mornings curses about the Healthline: “The Fucking Arteeaay bought those bastards from Florida! Three. Hundred. Thousand. Apiece! And they can’t go up a hill or in the snow. I got stopped on one that got caught in ice! Middle of the road! How did they think of that? And why they get those bonuses? Bonuses! Shiela’s sister is bashful and embarrassed. We get on the 9 in the mornings.
This morning I’m out before I see Shiela, and there’s daffodils blooming everywhere, white, today – they came up at night and it’s still dark in the morning, they’re like ghosts. I lean in close to take a picture, just to do, and I hear them say: “Be Alive.” They are white like ghosts in the dawn.

This morning we take the 9 it is packed full and crowded with people, it’s the death-bus, so full up and we all just hate, feel hate- it’s too early. For every one of us. I don’t even act like I’m not staring at the man who wears tube socks over his hands and doesn’t open his eyes. Is he a leper? I imagine, for no reason, that he smears Vaseline all over his hands, under the socks.
At work I work. Eventually. Getting there early, usually. “Do you have a girlfriend? Did you do something special this weekend?’ When they ask, I say: “None of the guys go steady because it would not be right to leave your best girl home on a Saturday night.”
I never eat either and I’m starving, I don’t want to go anywhere after work but to home, to eat. So I go, and eat. It’s so warm and the sun is out. I don’t even notice the daffodils now, I notice the wind blowing over me and it makes me feel like a clean, good stone. I go home, walk up the hill and in the woods I see a falcon. A fucking Falcon and I hear it mention: “Come Alive.” It even told me that. A falcon.
I have to eat a sandwich, bolt a sandwich and I don’t even eat hot meals, I don’t. I eat a sandwich and rush out, because B, from across some void has told me I have to go to do a thing, and I’m not favorable to being bossed but I remain amenable to doing the stuff that she suggests, even from across a void. So I miss my chance and have to walk down a hill. Stopping at home to eat and put on a jacket and tie, just because I have to because I’ll go among people and it’s right to show concern and appear in the fashion that you wish to appear. No Vaseline socks for me. Nosir.
I take the train all the way to the west side and look up from my book only to see the river, because the river is a dragon, you don’t understand, but once I found the red and shatter y scales strewn on the riverbank and knew, a dragon that eats iron and earth. It is green below and says, I hear it say: “Come Alive.” So I do. At 65th I always get turned around but find my way to the LGBT center, which – I wouldn’t know, I didn’t know. But there it is all postered over, the window. I have a feeling like going to church. This isn’t my place but everyone will be nice to me. Most times, you have a feeling that where you are going is not your place and you will be hassled – like the record store or the government. At the LGBT place and at churches – they act like it is fine that you showed up and thank you about it. I’ve gone to see a lady read her book to me. She’s a beautiful lady that I kind of know from the livejournal and once a meeting in new York. She reads her book to me about a boy who is thinking he might be a lady and there is an attempt by a lady who used to be a man to persuade the boy to be like her. I like that this book is about making a decision. Characters should have agency. Sometimes, in fiction. There are some questions and I see my friends Ryan and Carey and try to ask okay questions about writing books, and also Adventure Time and the Princess Cookie/ Dog Day Afternoon episode- which I felt could be usefully discussed as a study of the character and nature of Princess Bubblegum and the nature of the prevailing authority in the dominant culture, and then I’m even given a free book. I notice that there are people around, because of the LGBT aspect – and that these people – maybe when they were a 20 year old boy or a girl they had to make a decision, and I think about how I am glad that all the decisions and realizations that I had to have as a 20 year old boy in 1995 when I became Kingtycoon – were not very expensive. I feel like it is shitty to have to spend a lot of money to become who you want to be. I don’t have any money in my pockets and am given a book for free out of convivial goodness. I say I will buy drinks at Carey’s comedy show, which I realize I must attend as he is leaving town to become a more fully actualized man? Also because the Callahan sisters must quit Cleveland. Though I am certain that neither of them ever, ever did put their pants at their ankles to lean up against old Moses’ statue to pee on it. Because there is no toilet in public square. I watch the comedy and even laugh and Carey is the best that he has ever been and is very persuasive as a man, not – mind you – in a way where I think that there is some kind of persuasion involved, but rather in the way that a person comes into focus when you notice that they are who they are. I want to talk briefly about my ideas about the Semetic tradition of patriarchy – in which the father sacrifices his children – and compare it to what I take from the Wotanic version of the All-father, who plucks his own eye out, ostensibly for the sake of his children, and how these models are artifacts that inform the western patriarchy. I want to talk about it but Carey must perform. It’s fine. I go outside there’s a smokestack that says battery park and I keep thinking about beatings, I think beatings should happen there. But there are a million, million birds singing and dogs barking, I can hear them explaining to me: “Come Alive.” I go back inside and back and forth, I am very happy to be able to have and afford whiskey. I still have no dollars in my pocket and when the offering plate is passed on Carey’s account I offer a book by a Slovenian philosopher that I’ve been reading and love. It is about violence and I mention that the best thing, if I had a son or nephew, that I would explain is that the thing of being a man is- you can do whatever the fuck you want, and should – as long as you can run fast enough. Also the advice that I give to other men every time – which is never, ever fuck with me.
I have to run to catch the 26, and I hate running, and don’t want to ever run. But I do, and then end up sitting behind a man who probably shit in his pants, or just works in a job where he has to handle or deal with shit, because he smelled terribly of shit. I read the book Nevada that I was given, as a valuable prize and then get off at Public Square where the wind down Euclid hits me over the chest and I feel like a clean-good stone and my tie flies in the wind so I feel that I must look dashing. A lady stares at me, that makes me remember that, heck!, people have been staring at me all day. I knew right away, first thing – at the bus stop looking at daffodils, the people in their cars didn’t go when the light changed because they were staring. And on the busses that I take and later downtown on Public Square. I feel like, and have said, that if you know that people will notice you, because you are huge and impressive that you should dress a better way, to be agreeable, and so my tie is flapping in the wind and maybe I even cut a dashing figure and then I get on the healthline and scribble my notes on my notecards instead of reading and then walk back up the hill, my third time on it today, and there’s a smell of foxes and I can hear the electricity in all the streetlight so that even though they don’t, they seem to pulse and move and I can tell, by vision that they are saying or seem to say: “Come Alive.”
Then I come home, past the playground where earlier, on the way up the hill, the first time, I saw the beautiful young mother with her little kid and thought and thought about how I wanted to maybe know her, or just know about what it would be like if she was in my arms. And walking past now, at night, no one is there and I thought what it would be if I came home and she was there and how she would be sad because I had gone away all night to do whatever the fuck I want and to be stared at and give away and receive books. And then I wrote this all down before I go to bed alone because of how I am alive, like a falcon and a fucking streetlight told me to be.