It is too easy to be martyred. Your pride is more terrible than
that. You keep fighting. Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge.
Medea, not Christ, is your model. Where are the children to
kill? I could, I could. “ I too can stab, ” she told Jason. I too
can stab.
*
So now we have come to rest in this awful place, the windows
open in the cold storm of winter, the fumes turning even the
coldest, fiercest wind stagnant, rancid. The vagabonds shit in
the foyer of the building’s lobby and behind the stairwell and
hide out on the landing above us. We are five flights up. There
is no money to move one more time: and my friend, my sweet
boy, sleeps in wool and thermal underwear and sweatshirts
pale and blue as if frozen by death: and I sit by the open
window in the dead of winter, wintry winter, the wind
streaming in, a small electric heater just keeping my fingers
from freezing up stiff, and I write, I am cold and tired beyond
anything I can say, any words there are: a dying bird, broken
wing, on a plain of ice; some creature, lost and broken, on a
plain of ice, isolated, silent, fatigued, famished for warmth and
rest and rescue, having no hope, wanting not to turn cannibal before dying: crawling, crawling, trying to find the end of the icy plain, the rich brown earth, a plant, a flower:
rescue, escape: some oasis not ruined by heavy, wet, implacable
cold.
I am cold all the time. I walk six hours a day, eight hours a
day, then come to this apartment where the windows are never
closed. I am desperate beyond any imagining. You will never
know. It is amazing that I do not kill.
*
I am afraid of dying, especially of pneumonia. I am sick all the
time, fever, sore throat, chill to the bones, joints stiff, abdominal pains from the fumes, headaches from the fumes, dizziness from the fumes. I am afraid of sleeping, afraid of dying: each day is a nightmare of miles to walk not to die: is there
1 2. 6
money for a cup of coffee today? I am a refugee: profoundly
despondent and tired enough to die: I want somewhere to live:
really live: I imagine it: warm and pretty: clean: no human shit
in piles: little bourgeois dreamer: dumb cunt: eyes hurt like
Spinoza’s: I am in the apartment, there is a driving rain, violent
wind, I stand in the rain inside, drenched.
*
The fumes start in winter. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter
again, summer again: the edge of fall. The chill is in the marrow
of the bones. The fatigue makes the eyes gray and yellow,
great rings circle them: the skin is dirty ivory like soap left in a
bathtub for years: the fatigue is like the awful air that rises
from a garbage can left to melt in the sun: the fatigue especially
sits on the tongue, slowing it down, words are said in broken
syllables, sentences rarely finished: speech becomes desperate
