Labor Day. Never aptly named in anyway whatsoever. I am laboring through my labor... this is hardly labor, and no, I am not just making a play on words. Dave Marty found an old poem of mine, Killing Roaches with Strunk & White's Elements of Style... a poem which grabbed its first readers mostly due to its title. You understand fundamentally that the title of a poem will always grab the reader the most, because every one who comes across will be interested in what it has to say. And whether or not you have had anything to say about the topic. Or what creative energy you have pooled to force people to think. So what was the deal behind Strunk & White, it was about my first true feelings of turmoil, about struggling as the common man struggles, about falling from grace into one's own questionable decisions. But there was always a controversy around whether roaches were either metaphorical or real, in which case, the autobiographical reality was that they were very real. I can still look back at those hours of dread, coming home to find those amber colored insects perched on table tops or loping their way along the carpet... and the book which allowed me the most flexibility in terms of range and (how else can you call it?) flappability... long and taut enough to create a window of impact that would obliterate the dirty, sandy creatures... But even heavier-looming was the collapse of a long wonderful relationship I had with my ex-girlfriend... a relationship I had single-handedly dismantled out of the selfish recesses of my mind...

having this new shell of an apartment, a place I was at once both proud of and equally terrified of living in, I wanted to enjoy my new-found freedom, devoid of any real drawbacks... it's startling to think that any women besides those thoroughly invested in me for the long-term would have dared to come into that place. The ones that did were brave... even so, the line "the rift wider & wiser" seemed to fascinate Dave just as much as it did me... the actual writing of the line from the beginning seemed to me a cop-out. the obvious connection was the growing rift I had created, one of a mild alienation between myself and Kate, but the "wiser" connection was that both of us knew exactly what was created there, even if we might have said otherwise, no matter what new oaths I seemed to try to create to make her think that it wasn't so. But while reading Paradise Lost over the winter, as I did so with pleasure, I made the connection of being forsaken by God due to my actions, and condemned into the land of Nod... that atmosphere might not have been mistaken for anything else, dark brown muddy walls, likely painted so to cover up the gaudiness of the place, so that everything blended in unassumingly.

Strunk & White was my shield from that unrest because I cared little for the book. It was my personal version of J. Everett Pritchard that Robin Williams character spoke of in Dead Poets Society, because I never once felt the need to refer to it in order to write scholarly essays... elements of style . The style was there maybe in form but without content. I made it eleven months in that rotten dungeon of a catacomb, with the cockroaches, the spiders, and eventually, the bats. That was the beginning of the end for me, when the bats showed up, no doubt rabid, but also fearless as the one that swooped down, likely disturbed by the "sound" of human beings, maybe the scent of a potential prey to them. But there was also the one on the grate which clicked its talons as it readjusted itself on the metal meshing inside the door... it was straight out of a horror novel and it would consume my waning hours with terror for the next few weeks, and to a lesser degree until the time when I departed some months later... the lease may have been for eleven months, but I turned over the apartment to Christine Gantz, who likely decided shortly after moving in, that she too needed to vacate the premises as soon as possible... One can hardly blame her. It was no place for a woman of her stature, solitary and fearful, to spend long days especially during the summer, no matter how great her desire to "rough it" in the same manner as I did. So she moved on, and no doubt, the place stayed the same... it certainly couldn't have been much more rectified than it already was.

The man upstairs from me listened, I think, to rap music with his wife/girlfriend and their child who cried not constantly but at inopportune moments it seems. One morning, as I got ready for "working the skinny tie" my door opened hastily and the man from that apartment ambled in as if he, in fact, might have lived there. He looked up after a couple steps into the door, and saw me standing there, in the middle of buttoning my shirt. He apologized for walking in, saying that "he didn't know anyone even lived there." I found his statement somewhat plagued by consternation because even if he didn't realize that anyone lived there, what might his purpose have been for walking into an abandoned basement aprtment except for bold curiosity. I only looked at him, mouth agape. Did I need to worry now about strangers passing into my zone unaware, or unthinking about any consequences aurrounding the simple act of walking in, unannounced and helping themselves to unclaimed space to do...precisely what?

At any rate, the humming Emerson was a symbol of the lone creature comforts about the place... I used the refridgerator but it possessed the tendency to overcool and sometimes freeze the items I had stored within... it was not uncommon to come in and find frozen milk cartons on the top shelf, ice shards having formed where the milk should be. I seldom used the shelves, because I was afraid of reaching for a plate only to find a bug attached to the bottom, which would incur me to throw it against the wall. So it went without saying that I kept plates and cups in plain sight, out of the path of hidden insects or so I thought... there was a closet toward the back of the kitchen for storage but I never used that at all... most of my groceries went on top of the refridgerator where I thought it might be safe from all impending intruders. So fear & loathing overcame me... a fear that I would be attacked or caught unaware by unwanted guests. That spine-tingling sensation that I was being watched or on the verge of being singled out. The more I tried not to think about the bear in the corner, the harder I prayed that it not be there should I dare to look. So that was the spawn of Struvk & White, the thick wood out of which the whittle came... a relic of the time when I fell in love with poetry again, as a means of transcendence. Pure experience made surefire again in the hinterlands of the page...the method by which I made sense of it all. By which I felt an inkling of control, immortalizing my plight of killing roaches with pleasure, with disdain, thrashing aging slices of paper through the air to thrust an impact on my world...