To the immediate west, a beautiful sight, and simple in its looming.
I have the Sutro's constellation perched above me, its four red points blinking the the drink of fog and night like some ethereal port of entry.
The radio says it's coming up on 4AM, and 16th street's suddenly hot wired with chivying cries of the highly s**ed.
A barrage of them, eerily canned, one playboy after another sounding off burdened reports through the air: invisible behind trees and penumbras of streetlamps, but voices all the same, looping down from second and third story windows, each one flared from the augurs of narcotic frights to pa** leeward and careless to the women below.
You motherf**ers are goin' to jail.
And just like that-- a tacit inception of some shared psychic reasoning-- and the night falls slapdash into fugue, its haunted figures askitter with needlepoints surging willy-nilly through the body of them, as they go veering across the darkness like startled insects, a scratch, snipping, febrile emblem of indecisiveness, pushing on buzzers, imploring upward in hisses- every one of them
dying a little more.
Like the kid asprawl on the stoop, sick and keenly marginal like a late model Tantalus in up to his neck, denied fruit, and so realizing that the stuff's bigger than him; that it's the unrequited love and therefore in everything he sees.