Goddess as Lover

New York is the perfect place for a maniac.

I used to sense my mind shifting its various plates, angles and gewgaws in rampant instability as I roamed the streets of the Wes Village trying to fulfill my roles as ecstatic wanderer, sham hustler, misfired observer and seeker of the immediate comforts of lit-up byways, people and other scattered sustenances for my questing, disintegrating neediness.

Angry and frightened, weakened by self-doubt and impersonal mental tortures, I found there was escape into the always altering setting of people whom I would never know, and who would never know me. I loved to put on a self-conscious show as a mysterious presence slipping past those who safely belonged to the neighborhood on my way to some often really dubious assignation with a person, substance or simply a shelter from my incessantly molting consciousness. I was an urchin and I was in my early forties.

Everything changed when I lost my home(s) in Brooklyn, Hoboken and the Catskills and became briefly genuinely homeless. Then the brilliance of the sun and the reassuring green of June foliage became backdrops for hard benches to sleep on and indiferent people from whom to wait for a kindly look or an offer of a meal. I discovered the desolation of being ousted from a cocoon I wilfully shrugged off in favor of crack.