PRINCETON

I keep accidentally wandering into the Institute for Advanced Study. What I’m looking for is a Place for the Retarded.

The weather outside is frightful. Princeton is on intersession. Very few students on the main floor of Firestone Library; guards and fewer librarians elsewhere. I am alone in a Canadian poetry carrel on C floor. That’s the lowest level of the stacks.  

I savor the Cahiers of Paul Valery. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Holy shit! The dude took a lot of notes.   But I am lonely in a gigantic empty building. Little old me and 3,500,000 books. Thank God for free internet porn.

Not really. But an idiot could sit here and peacefully watch the stuff and nobody would know.

I stopped loving Philadelphia. Was it the 6 foot 2 inch drug-addled transvestite prostitute who used my alley as her office? I moved here. I love New York but not the pigeons and roaches and mice and especially the rats. I was in my rear parking lot this morning at 6:00 am and a rat-sized rodent was hopping though the snow. Oh no, I thought, oh no. But it was a bunny. They are crepuscular.