to wound the autumnal

Cities, cities, cities.

There's a lot I don't talk about.  Mainly because it makes people uncomfortable.  I do that.  Easily.  By talking.  Most citizens of the you ess don't want to talk about material reality.  The incalculable, mountainous waste and its (arguable) redistribution.  The inhumanity & the conditioning required to maintain it.  The filters we are not born with, these blinkers-that-do-not-blind, which we inculcate in the young.  I've seen it all--  though, not like Waits, not exclusively --through the yellow windows of the evening train; through silver rain and jitterbugging snows; through piney carnage adjacent to the tracks, in pressboard lean-tos toppled by police order; through the narrow angled concrete armpits of overpasses, overlooking the topographic impasto of leaves, flattened to-go cups, and silver plastic pouches ground together & mixed by the witchy hands of seasons, zephyrs and storms.

Like Dane McGowan and Austin Osman Spare, I've seen the wildstyle murals in the living rooms of the invisible, and found them beautiful.  Like them, because "real" & Not; like them, because pale & forgotten; like them, because barely the main character of my own life.  (Parasocial cretin!)  Like them, because I am quite unlike anyone I've ever met.  People rarely admit to being truly lost, let alone admit to homelessness as a semi-constant in these inconstant States of amnerika.

Cities are where I live, eat, sleep, and think, and they are where I have done most of my Time on this prison planet we call North America.  They're where I've found sufficient bits to collage together, to approximate the Human Suit which camouflages the inchoate ugliness of my psyche.  Cities taught me to write.  I write because it's easier than drawing.  Because even though I'm worse at writing than drawing, drawing takes more time & concentration, and the elements do not always permit it.  Sometimes the elements are environmental-- the noise and weather of bad emotions, of barroom chatter, of human imposition and resentment, of bodily complaint  --and sometimes the environments are elementally cruel and careless.  Drawing and painting are high concentration, whereas any fucking fool can blurt a sentence.

I've yet to form a sentence that accurately captures what hell is.  Much less bliss.  Cities are both.

Yeah, homelessness is part of everything.  Class neurosis.  Like the anxiety over brain damage.  It's inescapable.  It's part of me:  I talk about it / I don't talk about it.  Like being queer.  Or being a half century old.  I don't expect to be listened to.  I turn my ears off too.  It's all very inelegant and tiresome, and it tends to not have a Point, because it is a chronic condition of this life we are, we say, acclimated to.

Do you want to hear about it?  I don't.  I have been homeless several times.  Had "phases" of it.  If a 'phase' may be terrifying and interminable and a hidden stain on one's will to power thru Life.  Because, in the long view, cities have been my salvation as much as they've played purgatory.  Cities are the counterbalance on the scale of justice, for me; when I fled the countryside and the wilted flower power entrenched there, the failed and fractious past that is the american South, I found the future-- not in science fiction, but in the science fictional state OF city existence.  It is not natural.  It is far from nature.  In theoretical practice as much as reality.

But what is nature?  At the end of all this.  It's the rat with one eye who bounds from beneath the crumpled rear fender of your neighbor's Uber, to stop at the concrete bumper by your feet, to rise on its hindlegs and sniff, as if to say "Fancy meeting you here," before fucking away to the evening's routine.

Samuel R. Delany does not entirely capture this state of grace, in Dhalgren.  But he gets right up on it.

That's all I have to say, today.  You don't need to hear the rest.