What I've learned out here is to not-write. To leave my notebook behind. To not instinctively produce, like people who excessively snap and post online photos of their friends in any club or cafe or bar in any part of the world that all somehow and sadly looks the same, like tourists constantly snapping away with their cameras as if they're at work and usually at the same object. (Nothing assuages the ennui I get from looking at these kinds of photos.)

I'd rather construct whole cities of metaphors and associations, but leave them behind, like perfect tags scrawled under sinks in faraway places. Participate, agitate, collaborate, solve . . . but from the side, off-the-cuff, in a grey raincoat with deep pockets. As a friend asked me ages ago, Are you a poet or a tourist?

. . .

The tourist devours or substitutes with their sentimental suggestions. The poet inhabits, however briefly, however incompletely, with such heartbreaking yearning.




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