last night i ran out into the night, telling myself i didn't know you, it was breezing tough, the trees were howling like fingernails on chalkboards, like biting down hard, acidentally, on forks. but i wasn't cold. i was angry-warm and i was crying.

i often find it funny how perspective is so inaccurate. how driving daylight past these green slats piked into the ground to keep the children away from the world, you can see right through them. but here, alone at night, with silent bipedal action, i can only see through a few slats at a time. feeling barred in on one side, feeling shadows behind me.

sporadic bursts of light careen on slick wheels, barks of laughter or bites of popular trash digested and expunged so flippantly. and if it were any other day next month the sounds would be completely different.

i am a taste of a time.

dogs moan like croaking lawn mowers, refusing to start, chugging hello to winter in lazy updrafts of elegant smoke, hyper-ventilated into brief asthma attacks. splutter. cough. no go.

i look up and try to chase the moon with my eyes, and find only a gibbous, so i fear i am not a product of gravity tonight. i escapade into another corner turning, getting lost in the solitary hope of streetlights.

i am writing a dialogue in my head, i am writing a play and a movie and a generous story. it stars someone that is very nearly you, but not you, because you are very nearly never yourself. alongside you the star, is me -- well, someone very nearly like me -- because i'm never really me. we'd both agree on this. but it doesn't matter, because i never paid you to be my script advisor.

this story, it begins tonight, extends backward and ends with a soft chuckle in my throat. i cannot explain this to you directly, i'd have to show you, and even then, you'd have to be listening to understand.

the trees move like the ocean, and i feel as if this is right, a sea of night, myself a self-propelled piece of debris. i love the leaf litter in all the backed up gutters and storm water drains, i love the overgrown forests of unkempt people's unkempt gardens, i love the dilapidated makeshift yellow barring around busted up cement, protected by big business signs, warning of danger.

don't be a danger to their pockets, or to yours, keep your fingers warm inside next to metal and paper and plastic.

i know it stands a test of espionage. home-grown and flawed through out, peering through guillotines of light between window frames and blinds. attempting to catch glimpses of the big secret, that which keeps people in doors and smiling deep inside, at night.

i cross the street, scissor myself fast across abandoned children's crossings, and find a night-time mockery of the day in myself, and i fear i've become one of many wishes wished behind the blinds in a type of house similar of feeling to these.

and i see familiar writing on a house-front wall, and a splendour of insanity creeps into my mind and i contemplate asking politely of strangers, but i don't, i only stutter silently to myself asking questions inside impervious to wind.

asking louder, but not too loud, because two doors down is a child and a father and a need to get out of the cold.