mmmmcmlxxii

Empty Pockets and a Wealth of Information

Perhaps I should be sleeping.  Instead, my
mind is racing at a dizzying speed, so much 

so that I cannot stop it to focus on a damned 

thing, nor sleep.  And there’s much too much

that needs to be done.  Yet (and for example) 

I’ve no money.  There are a few pennies in a 

plastic tub in my closet, but didn’t we stop mak

ing pennies – can we even use them anymore?

So, the persistence of being so broke.  Which
indeed I am, and most especially now.  My
weekly box of food did not arrive – it usually
arrives on Monday, every once in a while on

Tuesday, but it’s now Wednesday.  I’m sitting
here in the dark, and I don’t want to write
on this subject any more – even though swim
ming through my head are a million pieces of

the story of what I have already begun and now
want nothing more than to end.  I’m missing any 

sense of ________ [insert either: humor, taste, 

smell, sight, direction, camaraderie, belonging, 

self].  I have lived in this city for over twenty-

five years now.  I’ve grown to loathe conveying

these feelings of depression.  Which most often 
(or most always) comes with some positivity, an

I can do this attitude.  While the notion that
I might not be able to grows within me.  It’s
that clock ticking, the age factor; deadlines,
which are what I’ve built a career around making

with flair, keep moving to a later date.  Plans
get swept under a rug in hopes they are for
gotten.  This just isn’t me.  I look to my left,
searching for a good way to transition into a

better life, a way to finish what I’m saying
without having stepped backwards.  Nothing
like that exists that I can see, either left, right,
directly in front of me, or (and my neck hurts

as it always does these days) when I crane my
pained neck around) on the wall behind me. I 

so want to laugh. I think of turning on the tele
vision, but something had caught my eye when

I first looked at the wall beside my bed. I look to
my left again. It’s a book’s cover art (of course it’s
a book).  There’s a cigarette hanging from a dog’s 

mouth.  The book is portrait of the artist as a young

dog, stories by the poet Dylan Thomas.  I can’t 

recall having ever read any poetry by him, 

but he’s someone that’s on my list (when I’d

picked it up from some Free: Take One box, 

I had assumed that is what it was, poetry).  It’s 

the bottom half of the cover of the book, the dog
seemingly mimicking the author (I assume) who’s 

pictured on the top half with a cigarette poked

at an odd angle into his mouth.  Mirror images,

I suppose, the poet and the dog, with cigarettes

dangling.  Well.  I suppose that I will go with that. 

And a hopefully somewhat redeeming word of apo

logy to you.  Now, have I done anything at all here?

Has my dignity been regained, in the very least?
I sit a moment and make the assumption that
it has not.  So, uphill I must go.  Or else, right?