if I had a million dollars

'If I had a million dollars 
we wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner
But we would eat Kraft dinner
of course we would, we'd just eat more

And if I had a million dollars,
I'd buy your love.'

I'd eat Rye bread for breakfast and lounge around thinking of my Caucasian rug. If I had a million dollars I still wouldn't be rich.

Today I walked in the fog with an immense sense of freedom, with nothing to do or prove and with nothing to say. It was like I was dead or something.

I am gradually building my house-the rustic French breakfast place that opens up onto the garden, the bookshelves, the leather chairs, the warmly lit rooms in which there is sparkling conversation, great ease with one's friends-in my mind. By the end I will have a good picture of it all, even if I'll never be able to inhabit it.

~~~

A young woman came in to clean the house. Well, with her tight black clothes and girlish physique it was only her coarse, worldly voice that gave any indication that she was in fact a lot older than she appeared. She didn't notice me sitting at the table, eating my porridge and immediately made for the heater on the other side of the room, giggling to herself as she did. She placed her right hand on the wall and then extended her left foot to the fire, warming herself up in a gesture that was at once elegant, graceful and economical. Is this how the old Degas felt?

~~~

I lie down on the couch and see the apartment in a brilliant, dark mirror on the wall. All the lights are off and the fog has hemmed us in, paralyzed us. It moves in from the north-west, is dense, dark and slow, making its way inwards, pushing against the high windows almost with a muffled thud. In the mirror you see another place, one you long to walk into as if on your first day on earth. You drift in and out of sleep, your thoughts and words strangely disengaged from your body. You sweat it out. Knots or bulbs that had been strung together in a tangled bundle now loosen up, unfurl, curl up on themselves like melting butter leaving a wonderful clear and fresh space as your senses rock themselves out of their slumber. Your eyes regain something of their former alertness, flutter erratically and dart to take in as much of the world as they can, as if gasping for some reality to latch onto. You remember the green before the Fall and consciousness takes those first tentative steps of freedom, emerging from the dense fog...

The pen pusher (the poet) and the drug pusher both seek out the perfect line. Blue speed, white ecstasy: chemicals soaring, caroming through your body, the dose/dope of love. Berkeley, '68: halls of light, exalted silence, wide experiments in loss. Colombian crack, Pakistani hashish, universal Man stoops below a trembling sun with his trembling yellow-stained hands: deal me another! 

Vapours clearing out a centuries-old mind, the mists of time purchased with a few dollars scrunched up in his fist. Veins exposed, ridges and blue shadows on the pale moonskin of his wrist. AR_IV_AC, lovely white goddess, harbinger of the sweet cold sweat of forgetfulness, hold out your hand to me this hour.