here they come—at 8 a.m. the heat already pawing at the pavement. Already, the stink of human failing in the bins. A cannibal of energies I dog the streets, leashed to trees, throwing shade on idle heat, the mpgs, the limbs exhausted in the captive flatulence of buses. I trapeze the blistered waves. The sun, coal fired. I pant along long stretches like the desert in Arabia. Impossible to know the north of south, the mirage neither the illusion nor hallucination. I see myself reflected—a darling of appliances, a howling: …it’s been a long cold lonely winter.