The light blub gave out on me this evening. I don't know when. I had left in on since the last evening. I had closed the blinds as tightly as I could against any daylight afterwards. I just didn't want to know what time it was. I ate an hour ago after thirty hours or so. I wish my body didn't know what hunger was. Then this room would be a perfect tomb. Hermitically sealed.

Two hours ago (what are two hours I wonder, what are two months, what are two centuries?) I had opened the windows and saw that it was dark outside. The trees stand in a hushed attention outside, each red leaf, distilled to a rich color,waiting to fall in preperation for the winter. I have been doing something like that. I have slept, for god only knows, how many hours. A darkness to block out other darknesses. Someone said I seem to be well adjusted to be a poet, who she termed tortured souls. I was ashmed at myself.

Is the mask I wear, working so well? Are they no chinks, no cracks in the wall through which my bones might give witness to what I really am? I should know better. I guess I have gotten good at this. Tear ducts have stopped working well. So in the absence of any lubrication, I escape by closing them out to the dry landscape of the soul. Things are working well and equilibirum is acheived. Why disturb it with agitation, by taking a knife or a blade to the veins? Why leave any more bloody marks on carpets in these houses I am passing through? Let every sentence end with a question mark. Let "." be banished from the language.

Somethings are better left raw just as some things are better and bitter, eaten raw. Mangoes for instance, green mangoes. Or sugarcane eaten raw. The rawness of the mangoes tingles the teeth so much so that they hurt. And while chewing sugar cane, as the sweetness sinks downwards, in the gullet, the unaccoustomed tounge is cut raw, red. Maybe what I have experienced is something like this. Maybe even life is like this.

I have sent my emotions out into the space, to take a walk. I imagine they are flying over all the cities of the world. Manhattan, San Francisco, Bombay, Casablanca, Copenhegan and finally standing on the piers of Howarh Bridge in Calcutta, that dark city that lives with wounds so deep that the air quivers with a smell of anguish that pervades everything and from which escape is impossible. Where Kali, the terrible Mother godess, is worshipped every harvest and whose clay idols are set adrift in the river Hoogly when the festival is over.

Now I am the core of a frozen glacier that is slowly breaking apart at the seams awaiting the sudden collaspse into the waters, in a thunderous crash of white foam or some kind of release.

Goodnight.

The actual contours of our topography — inward and outward — are hidden. But here, from my niche in the amphitheater wall, I looked out on a barren coast that was all richness, where everything was revealed, everything was measured in immensities and scintillas. Walking, I imagined that cells roamed freely here, if they could do such a thing. That's how much space there was. The uninhabited islands across the fjord were not coveted by anyone. They were mine to explore, camp on, hunt from — or anyone's. And whatever happened there, it would, at some later date, be taken away by the advance of the glacier.

The hill is like night against the clear sky. Your head framed against it, barely moving, and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts your bright gaze with its dark mass, your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow between distant slopes. You seem to play with the great hill and the clearness of the sky: to please me you echo the ancient background and make it purer.

         But you live elsewhere.

Your gentle blood came from elsewhere. The words you say have no meeting-point with the rugged sadness of this sky. You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud entangled one night among ancient branches.