tuesday july 17 2001    |    11:03 p.m.

i am so tired that my right eyebrow is threatening to twitch and i'm shivering.

to myself, i smell like latex gloves, cigarette smoke, hand lotion and disinfectant.

my dad has been in the hospital for a week and two days now. he's getting better slowly. i've been with him every day, and my mom has as much as she's been able to, because she needs to keep her job. waking up at 6:30 in the morning coming home at nine or ten or eleven or midnight or one, depending on the night, the circumstances, the ward, the visiting hours, the nurse.

harrowing would be a good word.

and on the flipside, another word which, as far as i know, doesn't exist. i mean i toss around the word life-changing all the fucking time. and i don't know that i've been quite this life-changed before. meaning at times i feel less like myself and more like myself than ever. like before-life and now-life are these superimposed images, with me-life in the middle.

i read an article in the new york times magazine a week or two ago that was brilliant. you don't know how much patrick's question about poetry (essentially, what makes poetry Poetry and rap lyrics or concrete blonde not Poetry? that kind of thing) has been bothering me since he asked. months i've been chasing around possible answers and dead-ending myself. so this article -- it sounds so easy but that's what makes it brilliant, that it's damn elusive -- by i believe greil marcus who comes up as the search result for THE GREATEST ROCK CRITIC OF ALL TIME if you look that up on google: this article says that, simply, rock lyrics create unresolved mystery, and poetry goes further by attempting solutions. in other, far shittier words, rock lyrics expose the problems and poems suggest the solutions. o greil marcus! i can't hold rolling stone against you! ---- which leaves the rap lyrics question unanswered. greil's not too clear on that, either; he's still working it out for himself, although he does say that rap lyrics approach the capital-p much more than rock lyrics. we're talking lyrics divorced from music entirely, in case that wasn't clear. so yes. i've been mulling this over.

a week and two days that feel like a lifetime and change. i can explain COPD to you in detail now. should you want me to. i can assemble a bi-pap mask. i know what the inside of the nondenominational lobby-chapel looks like, and i haven't been back because there are no windows but there is this stained glass thing with a dove in the center and i'd much rather be outside on the smokers' curb with my cigarette and my first or second or third cortadito (equal parts espresso, steamed milk, and a ton of sugar) from the ladies at the coffee cart. god would be there too if he could, rather than at that chapel. i can change the sheets in a bed without making the person in it have to get up. i have two respiratory therapist friends from haiti, and two patient-transportation friends from cuba, and i could tell you stories for days about the people i've been meeting and talking to.

but i can also say that now i know something about horror. and something about exhaustion. that i'm completely different from and very much the same as the person i was nine days ago.

and in the end i haven't said anything. not anything nearly like what i wish i could say.

patrick picked me up at eight today from the hospital, after my mom got back from work, so i could go home and get a little more sleep. but instead i'm back here. biting my nails. wondering how many cigarettes it'll take to settle my hands tonight before bed, and whether i'll really be able to quit after i finish these buy-2-get-2-free packs of camels. feeling the skin below my eyes sag and bunch up.

this is what i've been listening to this week, because i at least think it's interesting: the cure, buena vista social club, pet shop boys, herbie hancock, concrete blonde, hombres g. mainly the first two.

today i met rené, who wheeled my dad between rooms this evening. he moved here from cuba sixteen years ago. for the first time in maybe the ten years i've lived here, i talked to him -- someone presumably around my age -- entirely in spanish. this is something i do around my parents and spanish-speaking adults in general, but the general rule for hispanic kids in miami is they speak english with their friends and probably spanglish at home. so. i like rené because he asked me if i'd been to la isla (cuba) and we talked about geography really, and that's all that needed to be said. i hope i catch him on his break tomorrow, because i like the way he talks.

the things i think about so i don't have to think about the things i'm seeing: boys, coffee, edna st. vincent millay's life, cuba, work possibilities, movies i want to see but probably won't, writing letters, nights with denise and johnny and patrick, lists of books i want to read, lists of jazz records i want to get, how much i need a neck and back massage, how good my bed will feel when i finally sink into it.

i don't know you at all, and you don't know who you are, but i think you'll get this. at least my construction of you will get this. this, what i just wrote, is actually a letter to you. sure, go ahead and assume, you're probably right.

now a smokey before mom gets home.