I lost the city. The city lost me - lost track of me. The streets were gripped in a grim winter rictus, pinched, constricted, frozen at the bottom end of exhalation - dead and breathless, at the very bottom of outward breath. Cement, marble, glass, rubber, steam, I saw everything disconnected from the rest, piled up in accidental arrangement. People strewn about in maudlin aspects of loneliness and suffering, happy people lonely, suffering, tossed down by an indifferent God playing at jacks with a million insignificant fates. I was lost. I was cold. I was small and mean inside my coat. Two pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks soaked through with turgid run-off from the blackened heaps of snow - heaps like inverted graves on every corner. I moved through the streets, I was zero, I walked among the rotted frost-bitten feet of skyscrapers whose uppermost corners scraped ice out of the atmosphere by holding fast against the brutal plowing wind. Birds backed into filthy crevices with heads shoved deep under shivering wings. Wide fantastic emptiness spilled into me from above. Swirled inside me, marbled my darkness with a deeper black. There developed within a sinister hardening mucus of desperation. Empty desolation that urged me darker, if only to save myself from the sick and intermittent hoisting light.