I need someone

to keep me from spending money for the rest of the year. Seriously. All I do at home is eat, sleep, and spend money. This is baaaad.

I've decided that I'm not going to bed tonight until I finish Uncle Tungsten. I've got about 200 pages left. Doable.

I really, really, really love Borges. I react to his poems the same way that I react to T.S. Eliot's, and that's saying something. Plus, we share a fascination with dust.

Maybe I'll start posting a poem a day. It's more for me than anything, though, 'cause it'll force me to read a poem a day. Hmm. Readers (Marianela, Babz), what do you think?

Remorse for Any Death

Free of memory and hope,
unlimited, abstract, almost future,
the dead body is not somebody: It is death.
Like the God of the mystics, whom they insist has no attributes,
the dead person is no one everywhere,
is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.
We rob it of everything,
we do not leave it one color, one syllable:
Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,
there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.
It might even be thinking
what we are thinking.
We have divided among us, like thieves,
the treasure of nights and days.

-Jorge Luis Borges