I got no manifesto. But I guess sometimes wanting starts with what you don’t want. I.e., my near-blind great aunt tells me that she sees me walking into a great light. But when I look at the bald dyke on the cover of Chrome, all she means is loneliness. This is while I still live in Williamsburg in a friendship where I’m in love and she isn’t, though who knows. I hate this place. Enough with the mounted deer heads, already. Already a genre of poem is published in which dreams of city dwellers brim with deer, wolves, and rabbits. I’m part of it. I hate it but can’t unfeel the zeitgeist. Brooklyn is full of little neighborhoods like honeycomb ghettos. The Polish ghetto turns Hipster turns Italian Hasid West Indian Russian, all the way to the weirs of the Rockaways. It’s like traveling through little unhappy countries. Only it’s me that’s unhappy. I visit the bent ply & antique applique deer doily designer shops of Williamsburg and long to step into those silhouetted scapes. It’s not us hipsters’ fault; all those animals are stand-ins for soul. Even hipsters need spirit animals. And I read a bunch of poems by hipsters and they mean shit. I get married. Divorced. Finally I’m queer. The bald dyke is what I always wanted.