Just to clarify, just so you won’t get any ideas, none of this is real. None of it. There won’t be any turning of the page, because lets face it most people don’t turn pages anymore. We stare at screens. And I bethca you’re staring wide eyed at one right now.

In your cubicle under the bright excessive fluorescent lights, row after row of ‘em. They go on into the far distance, to some vague idea of a window and a world outside that window. A world you see as fleeting at the very beginning of a day and at the very end.

And just to clarify I’m talking about you here, not me.

I’m with my grandfather and he just passively, sarcastically got on my case about eating some pizza, that I was told I could have by my grandmother, but apparently he wanted.

That is where I am. In a single story house, on a street fucked with pines, in a state tucked just bellow the capital. The appendix in the sagging gut of America.

And just so you won’t get any ideas, none of this is real.

So here I am on the street where the people just don’t look like they’re from the fashion magazines, they are the exact people from the fashion magazines.

On the catwalk, yeah on the catwalk.

The stacked, brick balled fortresses of Vogue and Elle and Cunt and Dick swirl immortal youth above me.

The gaunt faces that eat spit for lunch, bob past on beanstalk legs. One would think a faint hint of life would flash in some of their eyes. Some hope, or thought, just something… but they’re just moveable mannequins, perfect undead flesh to paint on, needles to needle on. Anything they had beyond material value was sucked from their marrow and soul long ago.

Melancholic and epic sounding ain’t it?

Like some old man looking down from a high-rise closet, ticking away on his rusty, true friend the typewriter. This man, the spitting image of literati lost.

I take a step back. This is the third (second?) time I write that line.

None of this is real.

I stand on the corner, keen not to be taken up by the impending afternoon surge of suits and stilettos. Oh look here they come, right on time.

I duck out of the way and into the shade of a park. Central, large, lush. It is the jogging capital of the world - morning, noon and… well, probably not night.

The joggers huff n’ puff countless laps around a crystalline loop of a lake, the dapple shadows of autumn leaves skirting their lean, moist faces.

I’m really trying hard aren’t I?

And none of this is of any importance. Better move on, nothing to see here.

And with a flick of the switch it is night.

Furry, scrubby, bits of peeling flesh peer out from behind wary, glowing eyes… Or is that the other way around?

The amber of the streetlights echoes the bass of the bars on the streets. Let it flow and the froth of youth in tattered new cloths come pouring in.

Here I am, its 1912 and a punk band is playing pink and bleeding chords.

There I am, its 1952 and Stacy and Dee and Debbie and Dee suck face in poke dotted dresses.

Where am I in 1975 when the wirewalker thrills the crowds telling a new and invisible story?

So I am in 1998 and the piercings of his and her ears and nose and eyebrow and nip sparkle along in their jingle jangle street jamboree of a wedding where Russian immigrants fiddle away some vague Shostakovitch notes and the children “ride ‘em cowboy” on their mangy mutts.

The sheen of my eyes flick to and fro and back and go… nowhere and to the man under the hot lights croaking with his acoustic guitar gripped in his spidery bear paws.

And here is the convergence of young and old, rich and bold, rhyme and reason, forever playing on a loop, a crystalline loop, bordered by the residential brick with the door shut tight so the cops don’t know the goings on.

Her eyes catch me. And with needle and thread she sews me into her flesh.

With feigned interest I fuck a girl.

This is real.