She is comfortable on a bar stool that

was as leathery as the night dragging on her

nerves, and proceeds to order Baijiu from the

bartender thinking the red giants that were her ancestors

would twinkle and breathe in a thousand

years of culture, a main sequence of events

that led to her listening to Jazz on a metal stool

in the first place. Her vape is filled with cherries

and longing for uncertainty, an icy metal rocket

where she daydreams in time dilation, oblivious

to neon signs and looming asian flush, the

heat inherited from her heritage in the heavens,

built for low tolerance, high cholesterol and

a passionate sigh for teasing streetlamps. The

music plays, bass guitar strings stolen from a

Guzheng, and she weeps like the mist on a

mountain road to enlightenment.

Fever from the haze of headlamps; Every

point of light is an orb making its own statement;

All beers consumed on the table drool in languish,

some are lolled on the floor like their drinkers. But the

flushing ones are fainting into the next step – Plateaued on

sex but work is another type of alcohol that also causes you to

faint regularly, even when under the glare of cities your flesh

throbs to the pendulum of your heartbeat on overdrive. You

become chaste with loneliness instead and you cannot bear to

smell arms and fabric and the smoke of the corridors. You return

to a home too quiet that you can hear your fears, the glamor of the orbs

coalescing into a single point of exhaustion.

There were still sunsets in 2006 and

the radio still required a listening ear. Cars

honking at futures, no one expecting a flyover or

construction workers seeing the brunt of society in

the midday sun. If there were things to think about there

was always geometry, and the heavens appeared after the

sunset to educate movement by hide-and-seek, despite

light pollution giving constellations no respite. I watched above

and the workers did too, the bleeding clouds injured from city vices

too old for children. If the future was a red-black apocalypse there was still

pop-punk then, to make friends with the static from bad reception, all

before the buildings engulf us into a universe without sunsets, one

that forgets how child angst has the clarity of distant night flights.