How is someone supposed to articulate their own fate, not in a significant or even disfigured manor, but how when I study the achenes on a sugar covered strawberry I feel overwhelmed with an indomitable sadness. I’m reminded of a door on my parent’s old house that no longer exists, painted over by a wall that has no memory of its former self or the smell of pickapeppa from the rusted peach grill standing in the yard. Under tall baseball lights the park looked stainless last night for some reason, a high resolution photograph printed on top of the earlier transduction from my retina. I smoked two consecutive cigarettes in a mechanical order, sincerely grateful for the polyethylene circulating through my lungs and beside the bench (dedicated to “David” from the small gold placard on one armrest), there were seven or eight empty water bottles that seemed so egregiously discarded I had to wonder if someone was returning at some point to resume their bender. I turned from my seat to look over my shoulder several times into the hazy darkness, the same way I would listen as a kid to the monstrous sounds of a bush raking against my bedroom window. Afterwards back through the neighborhood, there was the distant, staccato rhythm of traffic in the air. Some cars growling, possibly lost for time—the rest gently awash through the rest of the night.