It’s September 11th.

It’s September 11th. The morning light is golden on the buildings and the leaves. I have been up every hour or so, body still pulsing with fear, although I have moments of calm, too. “It comes and goes,” a wise friend said. I did sleep for a few hours in the night, having tried to put myself to sleep first by reading the New Yorker, then with oud music. The NYer article, “A Cruel Country,” was a little too applicable to my own situation: Barthes mourning his mother. His words leapt out at me, not as solace but as empathy.

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it – or without being sure of not doing so ¬– although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.

…the apartment is warm, clean, well lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever [?] I am my own mother [husband].

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?

Everyone is “extremely nice” ¬– and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis.”)

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

So, Gary comes to pack today, moves tomorrow. I sit in different parts of the apartment, buzzing with confusion. What has happened? It was fast and it also wasn’t fast: the pot just boiled over. I don’t know if writing is good now. Is writing good? Sometimes it just excites me more, when I need to just calm down. And yet I find myself writing. A kind of baying. I’m baying. I do want to make literature out of it, I suppose, since that seems to be the only thing I can do. What else can I do? This is who I am: who he helped me to be.

So I wrote yesterday, among other things, this is a little censored:

World as oyster. Oyster beds. Beds. Profound ugliness at the core, inside the bed: a sharp pea that exploded. That false elation: elastic predicate, coming boomeranging back. Icepick, so rinky-dink. Tautological mayhem. It goes around and around. I was alone anyway. I stole this notebook. I was alone anyway. The idea, the thought, might be… to be less alone, more delighted. Idea, a book of one-sided letters. But that would be “dwelling.” Spin on your heel, turn on a dime, move on, don’t hesitate. “New Life” starts now. Soon: Sunday. mercury out of retrograde.

Jams, jellies: ineffective protection. The drawer empty now of the protection he didn’t need with me. Reeling. Little monsters in the underwear. I had a dream: the sky scowled. Dizzy as an undertaker. Washlet. Bidet. Who was my body, did I have a love.

Everything backfires (unruly love of others) in the acoustic slop of this broken century. Decade of mayhem. My “personal” life. Great tumult. Must turn on a dime. I have half a mind, I walked the line, I fell into a pit of an idea of an idea (bad idea, but I couldn’t help it). Snakes. Hair shock. Immobile device, claws at my raw fever. I stole this notebook.

Charged and golden with fear as a rare verb,  a hooting outlier  in the cold forest of betrayal. That limply idling liar. Liar liar liar liar liar. A magenta fool’s cap: his betrayals were tatters: he ralphed my world, wrinkled it, tore it up: resisted as stupendous blockage. Time for another time, robins. Hello robins. The fires are wending, kooky, feeble, blending – I am oxymoron in the dusky blandness of this awful pain, circular and huddled in the rain of fiery consciousness. Hooting.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have a horny hide – the hammers of sense and how I took him to the hospital when his hand bled. The blood came out from his hand. I put the cap on him before the surgery. I brought him the cool towels for his forehead. We each were able to shit as the other showered. I made him rice. I saw him fall down. I watched him come. I wanted to believe in our twin edifices, but how much, really, was only artifice? Now the long blue lights pierce the clouds to remember the day that changed the world, etc., and I am learning to experience the strange extremity of every moment.