Black humor is like these little pills you gulp down, not out of romanticism or alienation, but because there's nothing else to do. The fine, precise art of stumbling and groping. Being broke has a timeless quality. Remember the faces of Did and Gogo. Throw in a neologism while you're at it. Elvin Jones often poked a hole in the sky.

I visited the Charlesgate many nights. This bald, fat guy in a grimey, sleeveless t-shirt would hang out a second floor window screaming obscenities at anyone walking down the back alley. One particular evening Mickey got fed up, blew him a kiss, then heaved a chunk of brick into his chest. It knocked the wind out of him.

Sonnet #14

Comparisons are odious,i.e.
they stink. Are you a poet or are you
a buddhist? The Charlesgate Apartment Poems
gesture toward a cold, clanging space beyond
the parameters of time and place
much like Beckett's End Game which should not be
tinkered with by rinky-dink avant-gardists.
If one might strip his mind down and shed
all adornment, it's very probable that
he would wire himself to a rockin-chair.
Aloneness can't be made pretty and it's
not ugly either. Each night the streets
of this city empty themselves of laughter.
Then we are reduced to drops of rain, or stones,
or some stubborn sprigs of weed.

Jay Jaworski Seattle, 1992