The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane,
 unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays,
 superb,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and
 steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender,
 strong, light, splendidly uprising torward clear skies,
Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining
 islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters,
 the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d,
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the
 houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-
 brokers, the river-streets,
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing
 clouds aloft,
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the
 river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or
 ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d,
 beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the
 shops and shows,
A million people–manners free and superb–open voices–
 hospitality–the most courageous and friendly young
 men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!

My sentences have grown long and unwieldy, strange, with long hairs and whiskers sprouting out at odd angles, equivalent to the dreadlocked beards that hippies favor.

No more cute summations.

Pungent aphorisms.

The one paragraph sentence that says it all.

Instead I ramble, overflow my banks, I am a flooded city, trees and houses poking up above the murky water, the government is gone, absent, incompetent, and I go on, alluvial subconcious pulling up words I once knew to fill & block the white space.

What will be done? How will I ever write a novel like this, let alone a law brief? X sues Y, but why do I care? Is it the liquid work-time they’ll deposit ones and zeroes like into my PNC checking account? Yes that’s it, sure, it transforms into chicken nuggets and movie tickets and ballroom dancing at the Rainbow Room, sure, or another day in this Rotten Apple, Meretricious, vocab word from fifth grade, pulled out of Gatsby, remembered still as a word I didn’t know. Meretetricious beauty, everybody struggling for the same thing, the old nest, the roundabout, laymedown, the big nothing, sad nothing, this is how it goes, how the water goes, perfect madness, endless sadness, comma-d phrases, lists by Whitman, I sing, I sing, leaves, pages, my backpages, and the attics of my life — I am a fan (Dan’s fans, here me blow) of the Grateful Dead rockband — I was not always, not as a child, but I am now — but once, oneday, I reflected, with my friend, Don Thaddeo, about how our endless joy of listening was inexorably and firmly linked to the deep abyssmal sadness and tragedy of Jerry Garcia’s life — how many of his years were blown-away, gone, to the needle — the needle, the hard needle, took him, took others — but it took him, took him seriously, and the endless pleasure — God’s pleasure, no doubt — how did it compare? with the days not lived, both while he lived and after he died? Not that old, no, he could still be living, and yet is not. The Grateful Dead — Man’s Tragedy.

We must make choices wearing blindfolds.

We must walk out into rainstorms without raincoats. We must