As far as breathing all your air of New York City goes, I prefer the taste of drugs. The prettiness of drugs is, besides their delicious taste, you are not always feeling this horrible need to keep track of one's hallucinations. No, you're not feeling that at all. As a result of some hastily enacted statutes, however, I am not permitted to eat the drugs and go riding on the subway train. As a matter of fact I am not permitted to eat the drugs and do anything of interest at all, but it is on the subway train that one is always becoming confronted with hallucinations that, you are only wondering, am I supposed to keep this one?
     (And at the same time one is pointedly NOT having the hallucinations one so desperately desires to be having. You know the one: Where I am alone, in or near the subway train, and the man comes who is mellow, so mellow, with tangerine hair, and he is wearing an entire implicit AUTUMN of browns, and he looks right to me and he says: "Your heart is not an igloo. No, it's not!")
     That aside (can you really, honestly, in your heart, put that aside?), here are some of the hallucinations I am keeping track of. These actually have happened to me on the subway train, and if someone can tell me why I am keeping them, can they immediately e-mail to me at myheartisnotanigloo@verycoldmail.com please.
     1. While I am listening to a music with the aid of stereophonic headpieces, a man comes and sits very near to me. He is not wearing shoes, which I can only applaud (have you seen what the makers of shoes currently believe one should be wearing?), and he carries a jaunty plastic decanter that is due for retirement. Another man with corporate logos to think of comes and sits between I and the jaunty decanter fellow. An interaction between the two goes sour and I cannot hear it. The logo man is up quickly and away someplace else. I ponder his tenseness with relish. Soon a family of Latin-themed individuals comes and sits near us. When they, too, quickly move to elsewhere, I am confronted with two choices, neither of them delicious. The first: Think about the large kitchen knife that the man has shiningly removed from his jaunty plastic decanter, or The second: Decide that everyone in America is more tense than I. The music that is playing in my stereophonic earpieces at this time is "Summer's Almost Gone" by the Doors, and in fact summer did end at just that moment.
     2. I am standing at one of New York City's trendiest subway stations, however I am, naturally, two to seven years ahead of the trend. I gaze at the area across, where a train going in the wrong direction (a/k/a Williamsburg) will soon be arriving. Then, over the protests of her companion, a woman removes part of her pants--the upper part--and plants herself against the wall, leans towards me, and makes water. Two to seven days later, I am standing on a subway train and another woman pulls down her pants, she is two to seven feet away from me, and she, too, makes water.
     3. As I change from one cruel train to another on a winter day of recent, I arrive at the second platform to find the next train, my next cruel subway train, waiting for me to board it. There is urgency in the air, although, of course, there's not enough air. In any case. A woman is idly standing in the doorway of this train. I say to her, and she is saying
something but she looks baffled and distant, I say to her two times "Excuse me." As she is liking to ignore me, I must push past her, I must be timely. She is saying something again, and I offer back: "I told you excuse me please." I sit down on a gray plastic bench of the subway train.I have removed from my portmanteau some electrifying periodicals aimed at teens.
     Suddenly I am wondering if there aren't so very many other people on this cruel train. As I look up and perceive few, the woman's statement finally penetrates: "Out of service, out of service." Let me assure you that she is dressed in no significant indicators that would inform a man, or a semi-man in my case, that she was a subway servant. But as I look at her, I look just to the left to her, one gray bench away from me, where a man is lying on his back on the floor of the subway train, suffering, as a medicinal individual stands over him and tries to help. It becomes obvious to everyone, though no one unconnected to the incident is around, that this man is in biological trouble and the woman is his close companion, trying in her way to help. I am wearing an orange hat that unmistakably says: "I LOVE EVERYBODY."
     Must I continue? I don't know, and you must hurry to contact me, and yet, why? Why, when I am thankfully, yet again, in the grips of the much more powerful hallucination, the one that wipes away from my charred brain all the others: "Your heart is not an igloo, though it is very cold, and though it also, paradoxically, provides shelter from the cold."

NURSE VENDETTA "BABY ASPARAGUS" K-STARR is the star of many stages, as well as the number two health-care practitioner for the Lower East Side performance community. With lyricist, Mike Iveson, she has written scads of songs. You can catch her doing what she does best during the next Lucy Show on February 5th at Low in Dumbo. For more information, send an email to mrrrwrm@attglobal.net. (And please don’t look at her like that.)