Meathooks, notebooks, the whole city sky palely flaming & spectral bombs hitting that patch of river I see from my eastern window. The poets are dead, the city dying. Anne, Sylvia, Keats with his pa**ionate lungs, Berryman jumping from the bridge & waving, all the dreamers dead of their own dreams. Why have I stayed on as Horatio? Anne sends poems from the grave, Sylvia, letters. John Keats's ghostly cough comes through the wall board. What am I doing here? Why contend? I am a corpse who moves a pen that writes. I am a vessel for a voice that echoes. I write a novel & annihilate whole forests. I rearrange the cosmos by an inch.