So I'm waiting out the most recent cold spell in the basement of my sister and her boyfriend's house. The shelters fill up fast these nights and the nuns are tiring of me looking like a lost puppy just so they'll let me sleep in their kitchen.

The place is not bad ---the basement's half-finished. I've got my sleeping bag and guitar, and the use of their kid's computer.(You'd never guess what 12 year old girls download these days.) I lit a couple candles, and found an interesting chianti in Phil's "cellar" and downloaded a bunch of old songs I used to cry myself to sleep listening to,back more than thirty years ago.

I'd just become an orphan with my dad's death, and lived with my older sister in the family house until I got out of high school. My "catholic girl"(the quiet one) used to buy me candles and Gordon Lightfoot songs, while my wild "French Canadian girl' bought me poetry by Rimbaud, some pot to smoke, and some incense to cover up the pot smell.
It really is stunning how quickly I can turn a corner and I'm back to that time. I guess I haven't changed all that much----do any of us? And I sure haven't forgotten the first time I saw Danielle's breasts..."White Bird" was playing on the tape machine; she was wearing a blue and grey striped man's shirt, and I didn't know which of my body parts was gonna explode first.
The breakup with Catholic Carol just kinda happened, but Danielle took off one day with a Black Panther dude she'de been fuckin' on the side. For all these years she's been somewhere in my head and heart. I guess, as Kenneth Patchen wrote, we all need to have a nice juicy wound from the past that we can put neon lights around to advertise the fact that we've been hurt.(I read that almost 40 years, too.) So Gordon Lightfoot's singing, "Wherefore and the Why" and "Beautiful", the wine is finished, the candle's almost burned out,like me. I close my eyes and say my one honest prayer: "Help me, Danielle. I'm lost."