Coffee as of 3/14/78

i’ve decided to give up coffee. yesterday for instance i didn’t
drink any. today though i’ve downed three-fourth’s of a large sty-
rofoam cup of it. no, i can’t get off cigarettes, nor my love of
drinking. booze that is.

this late morning the rain is very very thin, like hair. the end of
snow is clumped & sooty, eaten & perhaps vomited back. there is a
misery in this. mists are thick in the treetops, like drenched sand.
rain somehow sifts clean thru these mists, making mud & the tree-trunks
black & tense, intense, severe. the gravel in my driveway almost seems
round, rounder, being wet. there’s a roundness to everything that’s
soaked: a fetus curled lovingly in its mother’s warm fluids.

from my window the creek is carrying chunks of green white-eyed ice,
like dead fish, or worse, the faces of all the people i’ve ever loved.

        the creek is thick & reminds me of coffee. it’s waking up
the large rocks along the bank, making them jittery. they bite at the
skin at their teeth.

        the creek swings around, wrapping around this tiny boro so
that ellport’s almost an island. or a head. there’s a way out on a
strip of land named burnstown. it’s filled with houses that can fit in
my palm but not in my mouth. the men there are unemployed since the
mill moved out & went to kentucky. they cld have followed. but a neck’s
a neck & certainly red has something to do with the color of money.

where the creek finally goes i don’t know but if it’s pittsburgh then
it’s not into a heart.