Dhalgren

that's not what it's for. French fried pickelilly and deep-dish-apple death won't get you through that wake up in the morning alive. Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won't move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphore if I ever heard one. Timed methods run out: coo, morning bird. I could stop before breathing marble basonets. Salvage a disjunctive, it's all you Middle of the ring around the Harley Davidson bush, blooming, blooming, shame, socks, derth and passion pudding, flowers, or Ms Crystaline Pristine. Her backwoods mystification is citified in the face. Penticle pie and hungar city, oh my oh too much, my meat and mashed potatoes pansey, my in the middle of it biche. Hart's blood is good fly-catching bait. So's fresh sheep-shit Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn't your running the mill broad loom, sword, or side. She's right on the guache circuit where a principle's a principle with all hell lined up to get paid. Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanley, Fibrilation, Factotum, Susquahana, Summer-fine-day. It's all the same

know there is one!'

'Maybe he's just making a good guess.'

'But I don't want him to—'

'They're supposed to got obituaries too, prepared on all the famous people around here who might die.'

'Oh, come on,' I said. 'Let's get out of here.'

'You keep askin' me to show you where they printed the thing…

I started away from the desk. 'But I don't see any rolls of paper around.

The presses aren't going. You mean a thirty-six page newspaper comes out of here every day?'

But Faust was already walking away, still chuckling, his white hair — sides, beard, and back — covering the bright choker.

'Joaquim?' I called. 'Joaquim, when do they actually print it? I mean this doesn't look like anybody's been in here since before the

going out along Broadway. The smoke was as bad as I've ever seen it-rolling from side-alleys, gauzing the streets in loose layers. Down one block, the face on an eight-(I counted)-story building was curtained with it, leaking out broken windows, to waterfall to the street, mounded and shifting.

One section of pavement had been replaced by metal

In the bitch's kitchen. You look for the dice this time. Maybe you can wind up a winner. Summary, Mopery, Titular, Wisdom, Thaumaturgy, Fictive, Samoa and five hands over. When I grow up I'm going to get a vasectomy all my own. (A dendrite in the glans is worthy of the bush.) Why does he insist on winter all the time? You can stutter in the water but that's not the way to think. Not thinking but the way thinking feels. Not knowledge but knowledge's form. If there're enough raisins, splay feet, and guilded hornet-heads, you can wish, dream, lie like a Saxon though you only pravaricate like a Virginia ham. George! the inginuity I've expended to fill five missing days. 

Conversation with furry Forest at Teddy's: 

'What are you writing now?' 

'I'm not writing anything,' I said. 'I haven't been writing anything and I'm not going to write anything.' 

He frowned, and I hoped a lot the lie had at least the structure of truth. But how can it? Which is why I haven't been able to write anything but his journal in so long. And thank the blinded stars, I feel the energies for that going. 

What other days from my life have gone? After a week, I can't remember five. After a year, how many days in it will you never think of again?

plates (some incomplete repair) clanging when I crossed. After another half hour the buildings were taller and the street was wider and the sky grey and streaked like weathered canvas, like silvered velvet.

On the wide steps to a black and glass office building was a fountain. I went up to examine: Wet patches of color on the dusty mosaic at the bottom; rust around the pentangle of nozzles on the cement ball; I climbed over the lip to look in what I guessed had held plants: dried stem stumps poked from ashey earth; beer and soda-can tabs. I stepped once on a wet patch of green and yellow mosaic-tiles with my bare foot; took my foot away and left a chalky print.

The bus came around the corner. It didn't scare me this time. I vaulted the fountain edge and sprinted down the steps.

The doors flap-clapped open even, before it stopped.

'Hey,' I called. 'How far up Broadway do you go?'

Do you know the expression on somebody's face when you wake them out of a sound sleep with something serious, like a fire or a death? (Small, bald, oyster-eyed black man, obsessed and trundling his bus from here to there.) 'How far you going?'

I told him: 'Pretty far.'

While he considered how far that was, I got on. Then we both thought about the last time I was on his bus; I don't know if the little movement of his head back into the khaki collar acknowledged that or not. But I'm sure that's what we were thinking. I also thought: There are no other passengers.

He closed the doors.

I sat behind him, looking at the broad front window as we shook on up the street.

A sound made me look back.

All the advertising cards had been filled with posters, or sections from posters, of George. From over the window his face looked down there; here were his knees. The long one over the back door showed his left leg, horizonal, foot to mid-thigh. A third of them were crotch-shots.

He feels the experience whose detritus is interleaved in the Orchids' pages/petals has left him a perfect voice with which he can say nothing; he can imagine nothing duller. (For that sentence to make sense, it must be ugly as possible. And it isn't-quite. So it fails.)

The sound again; so I got up and handed myself down the aisle, bar after bar. The old man — pretending to sleep — was so slumped in the back seat I couldn't see him till I passed the second door. One brown and ivory eye opened over his frayed collar slanting across the black wrinkle of an ear. He closed it again, turned away, and made that strangling moan-the sound, again, that till now I had suspected was something strained and complaining in the engine.

I sat, bare foot on the warm wheel case, boot on the bar below the seat in front. The smoke against the glass was fluid thick; runnels wormed the pane. Thinking (complicated thoughts): Life is smoke, the clear lines through it, encroached on and obliterated by it, are poems, crimes, orgasms — carried this analogy to every jounce and jump of the bus, ripple on the glass, even noticing that through the windows across the aisle I could see a few buildings.

The bus stopped. The driver twisted around; for a moment I thought he was speaking to the old man behind me: 'I can't take you no farther,' gripping the bar across the back of the driver's seat, elbow awkward in the air. 'I got you past the store.' He pauses significantly; I wish he hadn't. 'You'll be all right.'

Behind me the old man sniffled and shifted.

I stood up and, under George's eyes

The falsification of this journal: first off, it doesn't reflect my dayly life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous. 

What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have