IV

[The poet. What is his name. It doesn’t matter (alias TBA/TBD), this is obviously based on a real poet, thinly veiled, just short of plagiarism. His work will be published posthumously. Which then begs the question, why write. Who was his audience. Himself. Very briefly he was a writer for his college paper. His widow finds his vast collection of poems, years after his death when she is clearing out his actuarial files. Possible to be the hermit, the wisened sage in the cave, the philosopher fool in the middle of a metropolis. Cities are inhabited by nothing but poets. The poetics we live and sustain ourselves by. Yes, absolutely. The senses and the emotions dampened. Incurring damage, a low level kind of shell shock. He is an actuarial/insurance man. It’s taken him 40 plus years to reach this level of optimally comfortable complacency. Every facet of his life a comfortable routine, devoting his waking thoughts to the themes of his poems. All surface things. The phenomenal, phenomonist. The reality beyond human perception. Beyond suffering and happiness. The steps of his day. His mind is already at the office, before he even steps beyond the front awning of his apartment. The perpetual to-do-list. The three must-do items for the day and the endless list of back burner projects. Overcast, did the radio say rain or did Martha mention the chance of rain. What happened to Summer? Two weeks in Los Angeles visiting Martha’s sister in San Francisco. He would’ve rather stayed home, writing and reading. He should probably turn back and grab and umbrella, but his mind is already at the office. Down the block and the left on eighth avenue and into the fray of the morning legions, put on his blinders and find his caravan to the station. It’s all auto-pilot from here, although he still imagines getting distracted, by who knows what an errant updraft buoying a skirt or some theater bill, and before he knows it he’s tripped on the pavement and is trampled to death by the capitalist hordes. He thinks, curl up into a tight ball like he learned from summers on the farm, protect your head from the hooves. Where did summer go and now autumn and nothing but gray seamless skies to match the granite spires and the pale gum-stippled ground. Need to find Sarah a present. When’s her birthday again? October 23? No, that’s Martha’s June 23? He should ask Martha and write it down in his moleskin.
What is it at the office that makes him write a poem that is a memento mori as an ode to joy.

III

[Scrap that last post. That sucked. Here: a preliminary sketch]

The part of the downtown-bound train route where at 57th the tracks suddenly descended, dropping from the third floor tenements down through a set of concrete embankments squared off like some midtown sarcophagus, submerging into the dank rat warrens beneath the asphalt and elemental sod, it always made him think of tunneling to hell, not that hell was part of his belief system. It was just a fanciful vision, a recurring dream on the morning commute. A life long empiricist, he cherished the intransubstantiability of ashes and dirt, the machinations of good and evil rendered indistinguishable in the universal ploy of chaos and entropy. The world will end in ice, Mr. Frost, a slow irreversible heat death through the ages. Autumn always made him morose, or maybe not morose but thematically dower, or maybe it was the public sentiment of the era, wartime and it’s psychic ravages on the home front.

II

I know nothing. Or rather, what little I know is not very useful to me or I would imagine anyone else. Sometimes I marvel at how little I know (see figure I). I am the fool waxing fatalistic. As you can infer from the first figure, I know nothing of love, but I do know a little bit about hate and desire. I should say that there should be a separate subset outside of what I know and all I will ever know, a subset of all the things I don't know that I don't know, but this is sounding more and more like that Donald Rumsfeld quote about intelligence reports on terrorist sleeper cells. I don't claim to know nothing as some kind of political stance, a throwback to the xenophobic politics of the 1850s, the grand old know-nothing party, although it wouldn't be out of place in today's anti-immigrant climate.
Yes, this could be fertile territory for political satire, but I'm not clever enough to pul lit off. This is just a way to lower expectations, a fitting way to start the inescapable start, to begin the same tired beguine in this seedy ballroom.
Yes, the schemata asserts the fact that I know nothing, but then again amassing all we know as a species, every fecund seed of an idea, the human race knows very little in light of the inestimable cosmos.

I

[I would start writing, but the man sitting next to me here at the communal table reserved for laptops at Hot Java is processing rather loudly over the phone. In addition he punctuates his statements by hitting the table with his hand or tapping out a drum roll with his coffee cup. I can't place his accent, some kind of latin american, a lot of slurring, lilting phrases like that hackneyed caricature of an exasperated maitre'd, he's probably gay and foreign. He looks European, ruddy skin, hairy forearms, a ludicrous cow lick perched at the back of his crown like Dennis the Menace, wire frame glasses. I remember the Frenchman once telling me he could spot europeans by the way they wore tight really short shorts wedged up their buttcracks. The latin american's friend on the phone has had some kind of falling out with a girlfriend. He's urging his his friend to write her a letter. He's been talking on the phone for the last 15 minutes, tinkering on his laptop the whole time, responding every now and again, mostly absent-mindedly. "The only thing, Ray, is we can never underplay other people's feelings..." Another friend has just showed up at the cafe, a cute petite latina woman, with an equally cute short haircut—she doesn't look European—he waves at her and then rolls his eyes, motioning his hand in tight exuberant circles, the transnational gesture of blah, blah, blah, but what can he do with a friend in emotional crisis. So I would be writing now, but am too distracted. The Latin-Ameriican has finally ended his phone conversation and is now chatting with his girlfriend about some potential trick—yes, he's definitely gay and a bottom to boot. I would be writing now—not that I have a clear idea of a novel, a few vague ideas I've been tossing around in my head the last month or so. What else do I have going for me now that I've watched my cache of last season's tv shows. I need something more to show for all this unstructured, unbillable time. I need to remember to bring earphones]