Early, Late

I've been up all night, what I think of as D's Sleep Disease, which I seem to have caught, as though it were contagious. Nothing makes any sense. I consider my various roles, none of them matter, in any larger frame: what I might do, what I've done. This time of day, the only thing that makes a difference is a perfect omelet, steak and cheese, a slice of sour-dough toast with seedless blackberry preserves. My older daughter calls and I wish I could send her the money she needs for whatever it is she needs it for, but I'm broke, been broke for ten years, paying Child Support as a matter of course, bleeding the turnip dry. In most ways, I've failed. The absent father, the broken piggy bank. I look at the spread sheet and I don't see how things could be any different, this is where I am. I can't even make an apology, give it light and shit grows. The sumac is incredible, the way it fills space. I had a list of things I needed to get done at the museum, I was the only person on the floor, the only one sweating, I stank by the end of the day, when I got home I had to pour a bucket of water over my head, soap my pits (a great soap from Iowa) and rinse in the rain. It's worth it, to me, because I can write you, parlay experience into a paragraph, but I have a hang-nail and I broke my left little toe on the bottom stair and I wish I could sleep. It's raining hard, a drone on the metal roof, and I like the sound, better than those fucking whip-poor-wills, setting up in the distance, coming closer. I hate birds, their cheerful sound, only the crow sounds natural, a rasping, gutteral cry. Off my feed. I think about that, wonder why I expected anything else, Frost was right, the past is a bucket of ashes. I'm thinking about moving to Iowa, my connection here is tenuous at best, and there's decent work there, a staircase, a shower, something I could do, maybe rural north Florida, where people carve spoons in their spare time. I can't get far enough off the grid. I try, I bathe with rain-water, I heat with wood, it's not enough. I want to live in a cave with just an elk-skin shawl, tallow lamps, raw meat, ramps. Everything else is pretense.