The brevity of purpose presupposes itself.

Helen called while we chatted, and he tried to voice his concerns, his [newly old] life was less tale than mundane. You’re where? She echoed. This response depressed him. When are you coming home? The brakes are smoking. I see a hill looming on our relationship’s curvy road. He embodied the map of many aspirations met, and much suffering avoided. The phone glowed with another world ... I wondered how insane this seemed to her. We walked a paradigm she couldn’t readily enter; as a drop-dead woman, there is no seamless wander through these realms. You are constantly watched and hit on; all the men want to fuck you. The women watch you warily, seeing competition and deceit. Incognito is a self-projected fantasy we hinge our invisibility upon. She probably relishes the gated world of burb-dom, freed of the insistent sexual fantasies of pent-up urbanites. Women get a raw edge in our world; little wonder many want to retreat into relationships, to create a microcosm of what they’d imagine they’d live. He covets something she doesn’t want, and if he was ‘her’, she would waste no breath describing her infidelity to his ideals. You would seek to retreat to the nest as well, bombarded with violence on a subtler level. Look dude, I wanted to tell him, it’s the price of a trophy wife. You have to build a castle to keep her. Don’t blame her for your own desire to gamble, and lose the house on a drunken spree, for it’s most likely, the very trait she liked in you. You admonish the illusion of a an you’ve crated to not take responsibility foe or friend, for who you’re becoming, or who you are.


Mexican music blared from the tired muse of a jukebox, leaned up against a grease stained wall. The ominous crowd outside dispersed as a storm cloud would, without intension to rain. Snails slowed time for being, almost inert on their planter box. How do you think they got in here, he wanted to know. Dunno. Maybe they’re pets, or Buddhas. A street car shook the ground, and one extended its tentacle, to reassure itself. I realized we’d watched them, for the better part of an hour. ‘It’s weird how odd we get, when you focus on the mundane.’ The small pieces of what we ignore, police the secrets we openly claim. Somebody kicked the jukebox; a siren wailed. Gotta go, he said. Later, I meant. The temperature dropped and the door slammed. I frowned to think the days have such brevity, and purpose.



That night, I sped through my golden shoals of twilights’ incremental birth.
Too drunk in dollar beers to drive; I rode the borrowed cycle
though the aimless paths of the park,
seeking the open seas.