It's possible that I still live there
Apartment that is path-narrow
I don't want to be there in this poem if
Anyone else is, from the past, I want it to be empty
A lot of dust I let fall
It gets smaller      See mobiles from when, a flasher
Whose penis had broken off      That other mobile I
Made it's talismanic objects
A bottlecap a rose a centaur a cactus a coin

Several handmade afghans always and many filthy blankets
Shawls on whatever chair a Mexican shawl a cotton cloth from Africa
What about all of the plants they would get very scrubby
Cunty conches rock collections art everywhere collages and fans
But the apartment's a hallway and odah orange and purple curtains
     at one window
Held up by a rope and hanging clothes tacked up dividing successive 
     tiny rooms

Come into the kitchen from outside look down through slanty-floored
     narrow nearly-rooms
The mobiles dangle on the way to the real front room where radiant
     south light is
And there's some light in the kitchen in spring and summer
As well as in the corridorish bedrooms
In the kitchen's a small bathtub underneath it's dark cockroach
hell
In the toilet room off the kitchen are the Christmas tree
decorations
On top of the kitchen cabinet are dead radios never sent to
     Nicaragua
In the 80's and in the 70's are minor plants on the sill three or
four
They look like a few arms reaching malformed something always
     hangs beside the window
A plastic medallion someone once found or a shoehorn
No      the shoehorn was in a bedroom

You had to walk past people in bed to get anywhere
Ted's arm sticks out for some years near the shoehorn where is
     it exactly
And later a photo of Doug's is there of a man looking bored at a
     wrestling match
I've forgotten the books I sold so many for a living more flew
back
     the usual and all of Leibling
Fenellosa on art Fat City the Quiller Memorandum was always there
Shibumi the Time/Life Wildlife Series Levis-Strauss and -Bruhl
All of Stevenson herbals the Mahabharata the First Folio the new
     Tale of Genji the new Proust in the 70's when those were new

There isn't any room in this treehouse three flights up people
     keep coming in
They ring the buzzer in various codes which we often ignore
You can tell by the pressure applied to the button who it is
anyway
They keep coming in I won't enumerate but they're all there at
all
     of the ages and stages we
Were it's too crowded isn't it or not you love it whoever but I'm
     pushed far inside
At this moment finding space down the well of myself
Though I am this land this apartment in hieroglyphs inscribed
round
     the well as I drift down

This apartment wasn't me really it was everyone else it was the
     outer world
How did it all fit in it was all-nighters parties near-fistfights
     breakdowns
Endless conversation and controversy dinner parties on a bed
An eternal heart-to-heart "It smells like McSorley's in here"
A death occurs and a couple more offstage the room's full of
mourners
     I sit up half the night
Staring near the shoehorn hanging from a nail staring at nothing
Some wood in a bookshelf that never got varnished
Trying to understand how a person vanishes will I ever vanish

Outside's the block one year I dreamed so much I wasn't sure I
could
     tell the difference
Between sleeping and waking the block became me full of symbols
People keyed into my problems speaking somewhat in my codes but
Later the block became itself again
So fixedly that it's difficult for me to see it though it changes
Gets restaurants shops yuppies punks speculators drifting types
Buildings and cars and trash cans still there
Same old people whom I do like fixed in place just like me

So I walk up the block trapped in time not even so much in those
     times
But the time of walking up the block and around it to the store
Over the years I had too often walked on that block to the store
and back
What do you do in life go to the store and the next day and the
next and
Trapped in the time of walking to the store
And back one day I popped free from time
I popped out of sequence out of walking that stretch for a second
     everything felt light I wasn't there
That wasn't the first time something like this had happened
It had happened a few years earlier on Third Avenue
I didn't exactly leave time that time time slowed
And people slowed and walked in slow motion and had naked faces
They all looked vulnerable benign not hard but this time in
     1991
I realized I wasn't even there at all I was unlocated untimed

About a year and a half later and there is no connection
particularly
     I left New York