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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 

making pennies – can we use them anymore?

So, the persistence of being so broke. Which
indeed I am, and most especially am 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
want now to end. I’m missing any sense of
________ [insert humor, taste, smell, sight,
direction, camaraderie, belonging, self, even?].

I have lived in this city for over twenty-five
years now. I’ve grown to loathe conveying
these feelings of depression, mixed always
(or most always) with some positivity, some

I can do this attitude. While the notion that
I might not be able to grows within me. It’s
that clock ticking, the fact of my age; 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 to 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 left to the wall beside my bed. I
look 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, portrait of the artist as a young

dog, stories by the the poet Dylan Thomas. I 

can’t recall having ever read any poetry by him, 

but it’s something that’s on my list (when I’d

picked this up from some Free: Take One box, 

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

the bottom half of the over of the book, the dog
seemingly mimicking the author (I assume)
whose picture at the top with a cigarette poked

at an odd angle into his mouth. A dog with a
cigarette dangling from the side of this mouth.
Well.  I suppose that I will go with that. And a 

hopefully somewhat redeeming word of apology

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?