mating theater

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewish/7764499/

on a mission for unconditional chocolate 
icecream marches me across the wednesday 
evening street as the dark o'clock people 
have been released from the pavement's 
prison, retained, like the day's heat, within 

an island of concrete. 

the plaid pantry on the corner, with its wide 
florescent tongue, swipes stars from the night, 
it chums the black ocean above with its bright 
neon blood. it is a mecca summons the down 
& thirsty to kneel before its stupendous

box of glow. 

pack of clean-cut polo-shirted twenty-
somethings huddle in the parking lot, 
plotting their next misadventure. those
suburbanites have infested the neighborhood, 
barking from cars, peeing on our walls, 

they snapped 

the trance of craving this sleeper agent has been 
activated to fulfill, when i notice them 
pointing at an enormous bug, ambling 
on the asphalt past the spray-tanned 
girls, all shrill & pink, as  their backward 

capped boys flex 

for them, gesticulating at the oblivious 
insect, beaverton apparently bereft, as i 
wonder what it looks like from the bug's 
perspective, what it must be like to crawl 
across a parking lot, furrowed & cracked, 

pimpled with menacing 

dunes, as if picking its way across 
the acne scarred face of midnight itself-  
sixteen steps and just seconds must be 
an epic journey for an insect who may 
very well exert the equivalent of 

a year of its life 

just to navigate the vast span of 
a parking lot, not that it wanted to, but 
simply because it had the lousy luck of 
meandering into a desert, without food 
or map, seduced by the promise of 

exotic light, hoping 

something to eat presents itself 
along the way, and maybe meet other 
bugs, and perhaps get laid, not unlike 
those kids from beaverton, partying 
in the city on a weekday evening, 

"fuckin' cockroach!" 

one yells, theatrically stomping on 
the bug winces me as i walk by and tug 
on the dull metallic bar i should push, 
pulling myself into the dismal 
disco of 

titillated light.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-turtle/325125263/