A rock garden and artificial lake at the edge of the abyss. From inside the plate glass my father and I can watch a jazz trio perform outside in the rain, spaced like ornamental plants. And the camera flies overhead.

The supervisor of my therapist is my therapist.

Grandpa is vibrating at such a rate that we have to turn him off.

Bill.

In the office at a Bloomsbury country estate. We're publishing an essay on the Supreme Court and an essay on a war movie. I print one essay on the label of an apple juice bottle filled with urine. But I discover that part of it has been cut off.

On a bricks-and-mortar aircraft with one thousand twenty three of my fellow-travelers. It's like the Spruce Goose of public elementary schools. I peer into the scratched and darkened safety glass that separates me from the flight deck, where the pilot and the four vice pilots are busy navigating the cloudscape. When I get home there is a visit from a Kenyan soul singer. I show him out in a towel as the schoolchildren come home.

My father helps me clean the shower and write a song.

I fly even though where I'm going is closer than the airport. At the airport I have to rent a car, which is on the tenth floor. Where I'm going is underground.

A boy who was my friend as a child, then went mad, moves into a loft near the abandoned mental hospital.

Neil Young shot his sister where she worked in Iowa: at Denny's.

Flying over the dry hills of Syria with a winged mouse who, with a laser from his eyes, crumbles everything to the left of a dotted line to the dust. Later I find that Burt Bacharach, Terrence Howard, and Mark Ruffalo are on the same branch of the Tunisian family tree because they have all sported pencil-thin mustaches.

Three mock horseshoecrab skeletons to choose from: Some kind of democracy.

Sleeping on cold concrete in the room behind the platform, waiting for the train to come. At 4:30am I miss it by a few seconds, so I wait another hour in sleepless limbo. In other words: Get another blanket.

At a cigarette-style vending machine I buy a bottle of water for twenty five cents. When it comes out I see that the water is faintly discolored because two miniature chocolate chip cookies and a slice of apple are floating inside. The typesetter was smart when he pulled the lever for the New York Times instead.

When the Armies of the Air win the ground war, the resistance goes underground. Our primary strategy is to be affectionate at parties with Solo cups and soft music. Those who don't have what it takes tend to venture above ground and not return. My commander is at the bar and I am without a mission. I sit at the feet of a girl with black hair and get my scalp stroked for an hour. Then she gets up. Later I am the only one to notice that she is installing what look like lightbulbs in the windows and walls of our dugout. They are small spheres of nothing that grow very slowly into larger spheres. When pierced these spheres will unleash a thin yellow nothing into the air which will kill the resistance. She is a traitor. Searching for a way to communicate this to my commander by an act of affection, I follow the girl into the bar. She raises a pistol at my commander and fires before he can shoot himself. Then she swallows the last orb of nothing. The glow comes out her nose and eyes until her neck is a stump suspended and she crumples. The treachery went to the highest levels, we realize. And we are free to leave.

At a hilltop sketching class, my pad is too wide. So I decide to build an aquaduct from plastic blocks. I go down into the flats to get a permit from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Despite the best intentions of my escort, we arrive after closing hours and the policeman there invites us to come back later. On the way back up the hill, I take a shortcut through the aquaduct that I have built. When I arrive at the top the preparations are underway for a showdown. I prepare the watermelon. As I cut slivers of melon on the rind, then slice some off for tasting, I reinvent the fruit salad: watermelon, then blackberries, then pineapple, then little chunks of an enormous jumbo shrimp the size of a baseball bat. When I arrive at the end of the shrimp I find that most of the inside is rotten.

After looking both ways I pocket a waxy red seahorse and a thick blue anemone from a kiosk drawer full of spiny objects. I will use them in my own projections. Then I sneak out of the private theme park while the cement is still being laid down. I run into my best friend's mother and her two-year-old daughter, who responds to me like a twelve-year-old son. (It does not occur to me that my best friend may be trapped in the body of his little sister.) It becomes clear that she wants to make love to me. But I must leave to serve as valet to an elderly gentleman who is returning by plane to his wife. He makes it clear that he wants me to arrange an affair with my best friend's mother. But our attempt to change flights in mid-air fails due to the nature of civilian air travel. And on the ground our attempt to change vans in mid-road fails when the target van crashes one block ahead of us, splitting in two.

Three blueberry pies on a pole that fit exactly into the holes in the floor of my apartment and the two apartments below. And that blueberry filling is piping hot!

Watching a silent documentary, with lots of after-the-fact interviews, about a polyamourous multilingual compound. Then I find a sheath of blank paper near the printer, which turns out to have notes from the year I learned to write poetry on the other side. I arrive just as the previews are ending for a screening of a burlesque Glass Elevator. And afterwards the director wants me to score his documentary about a deaf-mute celibate compound. Hum me how it goes, I tell him.

At the gallery of modern art there is a stage show that repeats every fifteen minutes. The uninitiated file up a set of black stairs to a sort of mezzanine where we wait in silence. Then a set of noble and melancholy bulldogs are led past us to an exposed chamber up another set of stairs. A canned narration begins with a recording of Fyodr Dostoevsky, then Gabriel Garcia Marquez, stating one full sentence each chosen at random from their complete works. Then there are a series of lines delivered by planted actors in suits of black lace. The theme is the alienation of the bride. I am asked to adapt this spectacle for the page.