REASON + Dunno why but I am attracted to certain things. Some things give me a smile, turn my head. Loose leaves blowing across the street, the cold air. Beautiful people, who spend their time smiling inside, and shed light like a Christmas ornament, or even the way the toes curl at just the right moments. I am holding on to this attachment to things, rather than the prescribed sentimentality that gleams from our television screens. I am choosing to follow the leaf down the street. I am choosing to know why the toes curl when they do.
Today, everything's up in the air like toast. I don't know what's coming down.

IT DON"T BOTHER ME + I make a circle with my arms holding the mason jars in four stacks, ten jars in all, in a brown paper bag. They are full of the most magical of passions and elixir, rolling around in stirs of flower buds and wicked looking leaves. A man shakes the slick off his boot, down the street. I wonder what he stepped in. This is the first sun we've seen in days, and I am helping Katya move her stuff into her new house in West Oakland.
The floor underneath me creeks to be walked on, this old blue house. The kitchen is full of table, barely enough to squeeze by on. The people there are bright and tenacious, old souls crowding into one tiny room to make different kinds of tea and read their own notes to each other aloud, to each other. They are scared to go outside at night. The kids are lurking under the bridges, ready for a new bike. West Oakland gets foggy at night, like coffee in a toilet bowl, and the women down the street, the black dykes on the corner, say with all the sweet lovingkindness they can muster, "Boy youneed to get on outta this fog, Somebody run up on your ass."
But the days are bright and the light is good for dozing and walking about and if I could've I'd have liked to have taken a boat ride out onto the bay, and to have had a little pot there, and to smoke and drive the boat very fast, and that don't make me spoiled. Just extravagant. I think everyone here is a little extravagant. I that don't mean they ain't spoiled.
Now I am in Memphis. Sitting outside the deCleyre. Prometheus, to whom do you belong? Warming me legs by a fire. There are beer bottles, broken, half full, with cigarette butts. There is blood on the leaves in the garden. There are some kids with different leans to there face. There are kids broken where God broke Adam. There are holes in mouths. When was this not to be expected? We are not lessened by these things. I will go home and make up my mind to clean up things. I will wait until Christmas Eve, to say Merry Christmas. It is good to be home.