What I do here in D.C. is I ride my bicycle as a messenger all day and when I come home from work I'm tired and angry. I'm still young enough t o half believe most of this anger is just stored energy and sometimes you need it that way when you have to kick the cab that changes lanes into you at DuPont Circle. Sometimes you want to smash his rear view mirror saying "You won't be needing that anymore Motherfucker" and continue riding as hard as your heart and legs and lungs will move you through the rush hour. I get home and eat something then sit at the kitchen window and think about that white space that surrounds us when we sleep. That you might feel when you sit at the edge of your bed loading and unloading a snub nose .38 or that you might also have felt while riding a ferry across a northern Sound. This is the feeling I concentrate on. Tonight, one of those summer thunderstorms is approaching, flashing its dry lightning across the parkway, sort of a hazy reflection of the psychic landscape I traveled through earlier that is only now breaking out into this shared atmosphere. The rain won't begin until well after dark.

In the mornings my writing tends to make some sense. At night I am just too tired and spaced out, like tonight, if I wrote to you I would begin with the same old shit, that one poem in which I watch people hurrying through bus exhaust to greet their lives of ash. The one about courtrooms and hallways in post modern office buildings where my image is frozen in video surveillance cameras for a few gray seconds. The one where aircraft descend across the river of my heart! Where clouds wheel in over the empty parking lots of this swamp where they built our Nation's Capital, the city where I was born, and she has left me once again ...

I could go on. Of course my friend, Matt Redd, the cowboy I have spoken of from Utah fell into my life a couple of days ago, unexpected and unannounced as usual. He tells me about the bear he and the foreman from his ranch caught and let loose in a bar near Colorado. How Fish & Wildlife weren't amused. He says he's sent some books that I should get after he is gone and asks me what new jokes I know. His last night here I took him down to the Black Cat and around the corner to another more expensive place, then back to the faithful Gato Negra, and as we were walking there around 14th and U I got that good city feeling again for the first time in a long while. All the crap I overlook during work every day existed that night in its true moment of perfection: that old man mumbling outside a pharmacy looked almost distinguished holding his coat together, cane hooked over one arm. The smiling advertisements and tawdry awnings beamed with meaning beyond their graffiti and we felt the buoyant summer air brush through the trees to come down and walk with us, no, to move us along streets past all the joints and bars and restaurants with their doors and windows open. Even the dark lot of the used car place looked austere but magnificent, fenced in with its tinsel and colored pennants and razor wire.

Nights like that are where I used to draw my ammunition from, but I'm too tired to work much into poems. I'm just the shithead writing pretty letters now. I used to imagine that if I could make myself healthy and smart then I would feel content in life with the golden promise of my soul. Poor, schmoore, I thought. But each night my teeth inch closer to an expensive surgery I will never be able to afford, and I feel uncomfortable sometimes when I run into old friends from the punk rock days, who have graduated from law school. But I have felt that white space move in over aerials and satellite dishes of rooftops downtown, and it has cooled me at the end of the day as I rode home, passing my reflection across glass storefronts and the trees all humming with the first green buds of the season. Tonight I watch the slow barges move across the river I can see from my window between the steam plant and those warehouses. Soon the rain will start. The beer bottle sweats, the knife lies next to the bread. Sometimes I relax enough to feel the weight of the things I touch evening after evening, and I feel slightly less discouraged if it has taken me an entire year to write a single poem that I don't hate at the end of the month. But isn't this the lesson Rilke taught us? That it might take my life.