bird **** plummets onto the roadway pavement as pedestrian traffic moves through the crosswalk intersecting Johnson and Douglas, vaguely luminescent from the bright of the sun until they transit beneath the awning shadowed canopy of a downtown tree planted on the sidewalk and disappear around the sight-block of an old redbrick corner building now refitted to host a Burger King, its windows grimey with human sweat grease and fast-food fast-life apathy.....

// // ... // // ... . and as I open my eyes, I realize it for the visceral memory it is; a waking memory-dream of the job I once held at a smoke-shop downtown. A job obtusely abandoned with no more than a crisis-ridden "sorry-goodbye-so-sorry-*******-goodbye." These strange internal replicas of days spent in hours sitting, waiting, small-talk drenched in my own irrational impatience at everything-at-once, habitually referencing death as a way out from the hollow auditorium in the back of my head where all my thoughts lose themselves amongst their own reflections in an endless hall of mirrors. These are the only souvenirs I possess from the end of an era.

Life has simultaneously come and gone. Death and birth manifest in every moment. Dapper conventions leave a framework in place while I peep through the wide open margins where walls and windows should be, wondering if the jig is finally up.  

Long before both my birth and the birth of Christ, Heraclitus wrote:
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
and just as it is in life experienced, so it is in the grand rivers and overlooked tributary streams of memory quite the same.

And though it may not be the same river nor I the same man, the flow of both is contiguous with all. This I know for certain.