9/16/74

Thoughts make men strangers and create great moments of urgency, as well as nervousness, when a thought moves you to wake up and light a cigarette and lie back on pillow, content in thinking, in playing the thought through, that's the only way for it to die!

The death of a thought isn't wholesome like coming home from school for a glass of milk and cookies. There's no wholesomeness in guilt, but it comes in dreams in the form of pictures of saints and rabbinical figures lighting big cigars.

There's no thought like the one I'm having. It bends me backwards in my chair so that I tip over and break a few vertebrae. Thoughts come in harsh, colors, in voices that link you with mechanical impulses. Bad thoughts about people you loved but who betrayed you mean you still love them, and if you lie to yourself in thoughts and think that hate is simply the bent of human nature the people you think of will strike back with conviction and ire like names printed in black letters across the front of a tabloid.

More power to you, now that your thoughts are known, not weighed and pocketed like enzymes racing through your system, a thought of heartbreak on a summer night of revenge, bile swallowed and spat out across your neighbor's fence.

What does it matter if you die without thinking, but with a clear mind proceed into your new life, no thoughts of the future, your destiny's a shambles, of the past a crowd of animals passing up a ramp onto an ark floating out to sea like a man speaking his own defense, what's in a death but your thoughts while dying?

What's in your heart but someone thinking? Your intelligence nestled in a breast? A thought can be positive or negative, but the best are serene, that advocate no stance, tolerate only the moment, and flow to the source, unconcerned, like a caress.