Traffic is a tone poem to a city planner. Van Ness to Mission is only a line about love and death. Its iambic lurch connecting two ideas I’ve never thought before and won’t remember because I don’t have anything to write with. Every other block, another ping means a stop has been requested. The loneliest sound I’ve ever heard until I step off the bus and hear a woman singing softly to herself in Spanish. Glass scattered across the sidewalk shimmers beneath Doc’s Clock’s neon north star.

Johnny Thunders died of methadone and alcohol poisoning in New Orleans­—my hometown—in 1991. He was 38 years old.

I light up in the alley behind MacArthur station and can’t tell if it’s raining or if I’m just sweating. As in “Music for 18 Musicians,” the changes accumulate slowly until everything has changed. That’s the power of the radio’s endless epiphanies, everyone can relate. A quiet love is better than none. We were waiting for the light to die behind the clouds’ eyelids. The eye is an association of everything we’ve seen. I only saw veins pulsing, shifting in place.

The day makes its noise and we all listen. The sky’s the color of urine, the color of the spine of Robert Creeley’s collected poems. I still don’t know what silence equals. You keep insisting that I have something to tell you. Each channel is a reflection of someone’s thoughts. Mine’s Telemundo. Each television screen is a point in a constellation we’re sewing together in our sleep.

“I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time.” Read the suicide note of Wendy O. Williams who rose to fame singing almost naked with strategically placed pieces of duct tape as the front woman for The Plasmatics.

Midnight came and went in an hour. At night the G train only runs once a lifetime. Water moves between the subway tracks like the scales of a snake. I just waited. Everyone’s waiting for something. Nothing changed. Some trains have no discernible schedule. No one looks at each other on the platform. I walk out of the station into early morning’s milky light.

I’ve transcribed this argument with myself. Everyone can relate. Especially at 2 a.m. with the radio between stations. Under the moonlight, the serious moonlight. He was trying to let the sky into an empty room. Like the one you’re sitting in now. In the year of the medicated. I wanted the white space to bleed into words before you started crossing them out. To dissolve each distance in distance. I should’ve just shut the fuck up. That’s the story of my life. Everyone can relate.

Is it possible to never have had a father? Growing up, sometimes I felt like Jesus: my father was a ghost. I have a friend who’s never met his father. He knows his name, what city he lives in. Maybe he feels like some piece of himself he’s never known but can feel is lost in that city. A piece of my father died when he didn’t—that part of him that would not live for me.

An appeal to rock and roll will tell us almost nothing worth knowing. I know what it feels like to need a specific person but I can’t say what need is. I’d like to tell you how death infects our lives, how we are all living with it, but I can only relate how Johnny Ace died—some say he was playing Russian roulette, others believe it was a mob hit. Lou Reed wore a white armband to school the day after Johnny Ace died.

I’ve been so depressed lately. I’ve never read that line in a poem. I’d rather some attempt at beauty. Is anything beautiful anymore anyway? The light that drains through the tracks of the JMZ, a malt liquor halo. Every day I walk through it on my way home from work. On my way out of sleep.

Brian Jones drowned under the influence of alcohol and sedatives. The coroner’s report stated the cause as “death by misadventure.” A builder who had been renovating Jones’s house at the time is said to have confessed to the murder on his deathbed.

In grad school I wrote this poem about my dad trying to kill himself. I think the first line was “My father in the back of the ambulance asks for his cigarettes.” It was supposed to be kind of a joke. I wanted to laugh it off. Scotch tape over it with words that weren’t mine. No one really cared either way. It was easier if they just didn’t get the joke.

I miss the ice hanging from gutters in the alley behind my apartment. Wind lifted snow into the light from a streetlamp. I just stood there. Everything was crisp as a photograph. A year later, I was gone. When I was in high school I felt like I missed a friend I’d never known. It was around that time that I read about Elvis’s twin brother who died shortly after he was born. I don’t know where I read that or if it’s true.

Skip Spence was declared dead of a drug overdose by a coroner in Santa Cruz, only to get up and ask for a glass of water.

Is there anything left to talk about? The night spread out like wax. In the bathroom of the Turkey’s Nest, I pulled my dinner from my pocket. I pressed my fingers through the faucet’s tarnished gold. And then the strings came in.

Sometimes my dad would wear the scrubs that he’d been given as an inpatient around the house. In the poem he’s wearing them as we play football on the front lawn. I didn’t really remember that scene, just the feeling that someone knew. I wondered why he didn’t get rid of the evidence: the scrubs, the hospital bracelet he kept in his dresser drawer like a badge. I think I even used that metaphor. When my mom got to his house, the paramedics were lifting him into the ambulance and he asked her for his cigarettes. She told me about it years later.

Someone misses you. It is beautiful here. When I was in college I would sometimes go days without talking to anyone. I was slowly disappearing. I had to remember to breathe. Maybe that’s why I want to tell people these things, people I will never know. As I walked down Montgomery toward North Beach, no one would look at me. I wondered if I was even there. I felt the air touching my skin. It felt human. If I don’t leave my apartment nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens anyway.

George Eastman’s suicide note read: “To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?”

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth. Someone calls you “son” and you believe him. I walked out of the party onto Ave. A holding a plastic cup, a silver lining around the concrete jungle. Someone calls you something and you believe her. We walked home in silence, tired of not meaning anything we said.

“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” Said Terry Kath, guitarist and co-founder of Chicago, before shooting himself while playing Russian roulette.

Lunch trumps ambition every time. At the diner, our waitress described Wednesday’s specials in hushed tones. We were eating out of her hands. I thought she said, “nothing will ever make this stop.” Everyone laughed when Joe ordered spaghetti and meatballs.

The poem was really about my French tutor. About the time she told me that her mother committed suicide. I tried to pantomime my boredom with one of her lessons by putting my index and middle fingers into my mouth, thumb cocked back then released. I looked up at the kitchen ceiling. Then she told me. I wanted to tell her about my father, about him asking for his cigarettes. But I realized that there’s a hierarchy to grief. Her mother was dead, my father wasn’t. Another time she accused me of being stoned during our lesson. I wasn’t stoned, I was just really hungry.

During the transit strike, Gina walks over the Williamsburg bridge to work. I lie in bed and feel each point where our bodies touched while we slept. The highest paid MTA employees make about $53,000 a year. There are plenty of ways to know you’re not dying. Whatever light is left in the sky when she gets out of work.

In all the pictures I have of my father, he looks so unhappy. Sitting there wearing a too-tight T-shirt from the Audubon Zoo, holding me and my sister in his lap. I can’t remember my parents ever being together. They are always in separate houses. In his driver’s license photo my father’s eyes are closed. It’s the flash that does it. I always got a kick out of that. I don’t know why the people at the DMV didn’t make him retake it. Maybe they did and he just closed his eyes again.

As the platform becomes more crowded, I’m afraid someone will push me onto the tracks. Doesn’t everyone fear that sometimes? I don’t mind falling, I just don’t want to feel the impact. Someone is always forgotten, left out of the picture. You can’t drink in public anymore. You have to hide it away. Hold it down. I can’t remember the last time I heard silence. Electrical wires buzzing as they hold us apart. If we all feel this connection, is it real?

Something must happen to be forgotten. Everyone’s gotta learn sometime. I learned that from years of work. I learned that work doesn’t get any easier. We fell asleep in front of the television. Each rerun is comforting. Each comfort is cause for concern. Maybe that’s what David Hume meant by “habit.” My skin felt like wet glass. I could only hear my heart beating, so I turned the music off.