night cinema Around me, the world is weighted with a soft mauve-brown-grey gloom. Everyone on the street in the distance seems to be wearing the same outfit: white shirt, black shorts, cartoon-like, little model figures receeding up the road. A graveyard of toppled lime bikes on the intersection. Some kind of mammal activity in the trees overhead, cicadas falling silent in the long grass. The dandelion-grace to be carried by the wind undercut by the deep knowledge of foresight. It all moves, as if bidden. I am steady. followup This time you are overwhelmed in front of me (a seventh sense, an eighth colour, realer than reality), I am moving by impulse, as if bidden by script. Masterful. It is my machination and I cry at the end. I move along the rails of your world, cling to your lens weakly and greedily, trepidous to please and impress. It is late and as a game I pick out questions from the internet and you answer on my behalf before I can speak with connections I can't even fathom, and you're correct every time. You burn vividly at the bar, talking to people I can't stand. You move in and and strew your things all across the countertop -- and there I am, lashed to the desk, lashed to the domestic, carrying the daily burden of liang-ge-ren-de hopes and dreams, and still I envy and am bitterly encouraged. Now, tonight. I think about the bare road I have taken, the secateurs of my exacting closed mind pruning the lovely misaligned blooms, and I bury your memory amongst the overgrown graves.