“I came home broke with no job and this musician with a saxophone came walking down the stairs, playing the most beautiful music any of us had ever heard but we had nothing to tip him with other than our wonderment and wonderment does not put food on his plate and we are all starving poets, standing around in awe of each other, our stomachs hurting because only artists understand the pain of being hungry and only artists are broke and the economy of famished writers and singers and painters is collapsing (did it ever exist?) because how can we put aside time to make a living when we need tragedy and pain and beauty to live and how could we ever be part of a society that only employs those who do not need the money, or those who are in control of their mind and its impulses, or those who are not addicted to the rush of creation, of change, of heroin, of jazz, of beatnik society, of throwing up at three AM; swearing that chunks of intestinal lining and a still-beating heart are clumped together in the toilet next to bile and other various content of the stomach, because what is our last meal if not our life force, tying us to the cold bathroom tile in the early hours of the morning, when the only people awake are those with feelings so large that it might as well burst through their ribcage and kill us all and isn’t that the whole point of life, dying, what else would we live for, I mean, the only thing that brought me any joy today was the music of a saxophone player and I didn’t even have anything
to give him in return”
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