Basin y Missoula. I've been holed up in a one room loft in a former mining town for the past week and and a half. It's got one main street, two restaraunts and a bar. I fixate, glare, sneer and then laugh at my ridiculous obsessions concerning language and art. I miss the desert when I come upon a dry patch on the ground and then I stop missing it when I see a creek rushing with clear water. I sleep and then I wake. I examine the ability to sneak in a new idea or two, and wear it like a coat of fall leaves as I ponder the antlers of the poem that I am trying to fold down into a book. I was telling a friend last night that Butte feels like a poem I want to write. It's got all the vocabulary of the engine of a poem: a lake where a flock of geese perished all at once, an open mine that has eaten away at the city scape, and a pit where former lawn flowers apparently still bloom. It's very post-something - an aftermath of an idea, like the jail room in the alleyway near my apartment. I would hate to even spend an imaginary night there. But now, in the basement of two of my best friends' suburban house in Missoula, the cul-de-sac getting rained on outside, I am glad to be alive. The pages of this book, nestled near my laptop, my asthma inhaler sniffing at it.