The Freemont Bridge:

What are you going to do? Words lining the selfish halls of the brain, ringing distant bells of truth that always seems understandable but beyond reach like Dylan on speakers in another room. The night not hollow, but still empty, the city being given definition by those hacking out lives within it. Buildings loom like paintings or squat crows tethered to city blocks and not power lines. The camera is steadied, the lens achieving envied focus. You can feel the sliding, electric buzz of human occupation. Lights dim, flicker, nod, shut off completely, and then are renewed. There may be a woman at the window, her fingers pressed lightly to the glass as if it were thin ice. Heartbreak for the moment. Maybe a man sits in a chair facing west. He has watched the sun set, the town now assuming the light of a no longer sun. Night forces the glow to come from within. Trace vestiges of heat and capacity murmuring down streets and alleys. All roads lead to all other roads.

Between. Night. Day. Portland, Oregon:

Cheap silver pocket cameras and trains to all points south. Specifically, California:

Kelly Point Park, Portland, Oregon:

Gems lay hidden like laughter. Nights of a stillborn age — men and women out looking for things which don’t just appear in the culture. Alcohol is funneled down cackling throats. Desirous internal engines fire. Glances are cast, reeled, and cast again. Amongst we the peoples, those given over to poverties and guns, sickness born from the planes that traverse skies clouded and scratched with branches yet to bear leaves, are questions. Sleep doesn’t yet come, so I trace the crooked staff of the interrogative in search of. The windows sport reflective, mimetic orange clouds that hang ragged above the city. Responsibilities. Language. Filaments flicker in housings [and houses] not long meant for this world. I must vacate, starting anew with the coming of sunlight – a thought or a burrowing train streaking into the eyes. Cars slur about, motors flinging minutes from their exhaust pipes. Time roars right along. Doors swing open and laughter tumbles into the street, tangling me into a strangled, complicated, lonely syncopation. There is lunacy in neon. One way streets make true haste of direction. What am I trying to say, might I just be attempting to live in a physical world? Tolstoy claimed you couldn’t not think. Kafka gave us books, axes with which we might chop at the frozen sea of self. Wallace found it curious that hypocrisy and paradox were not the same thing. The roads and pitiless, obsidian nights stir beyond my still walls. Great men and women live, raging, their sails being shorn against born weather(s). I slip amongst them with my pen and paper. A witness, one slowly being brought to bear. These days will continue to spill and I’ll be there to sift through debris and dirt.