Post-mortem

Flurries whiplash daylong.  Sky the color of a flawed pearl.  The sidewalks sediment into ice, ooze to slush, accrete to ice.  Moonscape half grime, half glitter.  Solitary astronauts bouncing through the craters.  A muffled mimic undermusic, like the background the background hears nothing in.  Wind—a sluttish, gaptooth’d laugh—fingers down the sutures between a neckline and a scarf, or pant-cuffs and boots.  A riddled shroud.  The radiance and gloom of 4 pm.
Up the streets, sporadic little boxes filled with hydrocarbon light.  Hours and hours without hearing voices.  Sudden voices.  Mental static.
Snow plows, buses with one passenger rumble by.  Scribble-fits, lethargy, numb hunger, inability to eat, longueurs, masturbatory rages, quick-clipped lonely exultant walks, absentmindedness, erotic visions, ecstatic touchpoints for a page or two.  Sullen glamours, entertaining myself with self-delusions and rubbishy counter-logic.  Hangnails, chapped skin.  Riding out a chance thought til it chances to slide sideways and away, back wherever thoughts come from.  Or go to.  Moments lost in meditation on how little I’m doing.  Match-struck, struck-out.  Then, halo-lit, vast peace and beatific gratitude. 
Vague aches in the arms and quads from atrophic muscles.  Dull-eyed, heavy-lidded, spooning instant soup, scanning headlines.  Tiny chirrups, mistaken for a squeaking floorboard or fizzles from the lizard.  Glassed-in, jerky cricket twitches.  Eyeless squirming mealworms I have fed him. 
Columns of ice—organ-pipes, prison bars—gild the rockface, cliff interred with void.  Journalism du jour.  Papering over the time.  Getting on and putting off.  Putting on, getting off.  Some momentary meaning to this something-something, which abuts the about of a bout.  A scab-picking mind.  Showers taken for their warmth alone. 
Talking with a cold old friend.  There’s nothing worth having, said to cheer him up.  Thinking of Euripides in his cave, that ranting craggy farceur.  Writing invented to keep a mercantile inventory (Phoenician, Sumerian): calculations and sucking-stones.  The Bellerophon letter—shaving off the excremental, tattooing subtle methods of revenge.
So much writing lost; lost laments.  Empedocles, a fire-wizard: his spells now earth-besmirched, sea-torn, wind-ravished…  Socrates with his paltry myth of reason.  Too noble to take money, would barter his philosophy with a whore.  Afraid writing would hasten forgetting.  Spit on by flea-bitten Diogenes: eh, give me a reason I shouldn’t piss right here in the marketplace.  Naked in his tub: a legend’s leg end.  Petty vanities hem us in on every side.  We hug to some hermeticism, some inscrutability.
Trundling home again.  Stiffness in the joints.  Then, spliff-fed.  Fizzle-brained.  Bumfuzzled.  Waiting for the next instant’s waiting to begin.  And the small quiet floating above it all that walls me in.