I depend on the kindness of strangers


for the love to sustain me, not sex, but love. Alone for years, I got my love from dogs and children, memories and speculation. Recollecting a long lost incident would send shivers up my spine. Kids are great in any language, not yet hard and cold like the cities we build them. I could extract the love from a rock. This is rapture of the deep, the euphoria of terminal decadence, the smile of a man who knows that death is near. The walls that surround me have doors that open out to worlds beyond. I’m at odds with the world but getting even with Nature, killing time before it kills me. I’m learning to crawl again as growing pains fade at 50 and rigor mortis sets in like a Flagstaff winter, cold and hard, the stiffening that comes with age, an old baguette ready to be starch for the soup.

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