with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack program
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file

it sits outside my window now
like and old woman going to market
it sits and watches me,
it sweats nevously
through wire and fog and dog—bark

the history of melancholia
includes all of us.
me, I writhe in dirty sheets
while staring at blue walls
and nothing.

yes, they begin out in a willow, I
the starch mountains begin out in
and keep right on going without re
pumas and nectarines
somehow these mountains are like

“Chinaski, you got a following in
Denver...”
“yeah?”
“yeah, I got a magazine and I wan
poems from you...”

I awakened to dryness and the fern
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled co
surrounded me with their uselessne

never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that

he sat naked and drunk in a room o
night, running the blade of the kn
under his fingernails, smiling, th
of all the letters he had received
telling him that

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break

sometimes you climb out of bed in
I’m not going to make it, but you
remembering all the times you’ve f
you walk to the bathroom, do your
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my,