But there's no reason to speak when you're stuck in a small apartment alone. I could have talked to myself of course but I know from experience that I never listen to anything I say, so why bother? Instead I just looked at pictures of cats on the Internet, and a few memes here and there. And I drank lots of cold stuff, which has left me sloshy and sent me to the bathroom too frequently. such is life in the central valley.
Right now I'm doing laundry, which my melted brain forgot earlier. It was almost ten o'clock before I got started, and it will probably be well after one o'clock in the morning before it is done. But then I'm sure I couldn't sleep anyway. I'd like to take a shower, but I have to wait until the clean towels are out of the dryer. Had it not been so hot I'd have gone to K-mart today to buy a few new towels, which were on sale, and used the bonus cash that expired tonight to partly pay for them. Another thing that damned sun must answer for.
The next two days are going to be worse than today, then we will get a couple of days as bad as today, and after that we should get back to days no worse than Saturday was. Yay. I hope the milk lasts until then, because I really don't want to walk more than fifty feet at a time in this weather. Thank goodness the laundry room isn't sixty feet away.
Sunday Verse
A Spring Piece Left In the Middle
by Nazim Hikmet
Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
in capitals:
SPRING
SPRING
SPRING...
And me - poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
every day
for two liras-
why,
since spring
has come, am I
still sitting here
like a ragged
black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
I fly out of the printer's,
I'm on the street.
The lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket.
SPRING IN THE AIR...
In the barbershops
they're powdering
the sallow cheeks
of the pariah of Publishers Row.
And in the store windows
three-color bookcovers
flash like sunstruck mirrors.
But me,
I don't have even a book of ABC's
that lives on this street
and carries my name on its door!
But what the hell...
I don't look back,
the lead dirt of the composing room
on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
SPRING IN THE AIR...
*
The piece got left in the middle.
It rained and swamped the lines.
But oh! what I would have written...
The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page
three-volume manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm...
The sea would start smelling sweet.
Spring would rear up
like a sweating red mare
and, leaping onto its bare back,
I'd ride it
into the water.
Then
my typewriter would follow me
every step of the way.
I'd say:
''Oh, don't do it!
Leave me alone for an hour...''
then
my head-my hair failing out-
would shout into the distance:
''I AM IN LOVE...''
*
I'm twenty-seven,
she's seventeen.
''Blind Cupid,
lame Cupid,
both blind and lame Cupid
said, Love this girl,''
I was going to write;
I couldn't say it
but still can!
But if
it rained,
if the lines I wrote got swamped,
if I have twenty-five cents left in my pocket,
what the hell...
Hey, spring is here spring is here spring
spring is here!
My blood is budding inside me!