Sometimes, sometimes:

I stand languidly at the tippy-top of Federal Hill, and let my eyeballs roll by the neon and the water and the skyscrapers. I look and feel spooky. The wind throws my hair around, tosses it from side to side like pizza dough. It ends up looking spectacular, pointing upward toward heaven, or whatever.

Someone less interesting — someone that perhaps used to be myself — would say something here: “And this is what I think about . . .”

But, I will be frank with you, gentle reader: I think about damn near nothing at all. I sometimes think, “I look and feel spooky!” and I’m done with it. How I end up on Federal Hill four nights week, I don’t know. It’s a hell of a climb from where I approach the hill: no stairs or walkways for me, no ma’am. I jut up that bastard with fleshy lunges. I think, just a little bit, as I ascend the grassy backside of the slumbering creature: I look and feel spooky!

And I feel the fresh freshness of a Psychopath. It feels like home!

Which, yes, brings us back around:

I stand languidly at the top of Federal Hill.

How my muscles have any energy left to sap slurpingly from my boyish frame, I don’t know. It must be all the mashed rutabaga and acorn squash that I’ve been stuffing myself with lately. I’ve been eating a whole hell of a lot of creamy yellow vegetables, come to think of it.

It must be the mashed rutabaga an acorn squash, yeah.

Anyway: It’s dizzying up there. It’s dizzying to think about now, really. I think now also how a younger version of myself used to stare at flashy beautiful things at the top of Federal Hill. Those were some nice circumstances, back then. I’d love to own those circumstances today. Instead, I cart around this load of old, old bricks and broken light bulbs, yeah. Everything is black and white and odorless.

Yeah, I’d like to feel like that boy again.

I have his haircut and his stupid face and his death-pale flesh. But the tick-tocking on the inside of this old chest is tick-ticking in the direction of bad feelings and, frankly, hallucinogenic schizophrenia.

Maybe!

Hm, yes: My heart — once his — has been beating like an electromotive meatbag in the span of many months. It fops against this death-pale chest. It flumps when I think of how it used to fop, three years ago.

And how I need to inhabit the small, cozy space of that three-years-ago mind again. I live in it four times a week at the top of Federal Hill, staring at lovely lovelies and murky water while my tick-tocking organ jerks around inside of me like a ravenous turnip, brought to life with sorcery and moon-time psychosis.

And what I want also: To be in the little rooms of homes that fed me and taught me words and numbers. I would go there right now, even if it meant never stepping foot on the forehead of Federal Hill for the rest of my fop-flumping days. Oh, lord, would I ever.

I spoke with you, dear friend, in the deep-dark of last night, if you’ll recall, and I lead you through a corn field near a house of rooms I used to call Mine. What a walk! I have been on thousands of walks — more than half of them in the last five years, don’t you know — and that corn field walk, it was number sixteen in the Big List of Walks.

Number one is a secret.

Number three happened in a dream.

I almost had my teenage years taken away from me with number eight.

But number sixteen! Oh, oh, oh.

Number fifteen, if you must know, was the same exact walk in a non-lonesome sense. It was winter, and the night concluded with simple pleasures and circumstances that I would be delighted to inherent in the present moment.

I’d take those circumstances over the ones I found myself in three years ago. It goes without say that I’d take them over the ones I carry with me now.

You see, my mind worked differently back then.

And now it’s a whirling ball of egg yolk and acorn shells. Jesus God, is it ever.

Is it ever.