A wolf of the Steppes that has lost his way and strayed into the towns and life of the herd: a more fitting image could not be found for your shy loneliness, your savagery, your restlessness, your homesickness, your homelessness. —Hesse

Sidebar is the origin. Short Street is the x-axis and Limestone the y-axis.
Follow me? This is the kind of pictograph I need to make my point. My point
is, little satellites of togetherness cover a waning city, offering the last hope
of filling the mountain-sized emptiness inside you, before the drunk lie down.
So there’s no need to panic, just go here and there. At the table of intellectual
bar-talk, you are too drunk. At the sensuous rave, you are too sober. You are too
flitting: even if you find her in the night, you will leave her for another
encounter. Married to inner solitude. In the borderland of creepers

you touch the arm and are touched by the Latina woman. The Latina woman
is older and kisses your mouth with old kisses of sadness. Kisses of sadness
are sloppy kisses, thrown away, into the night of your mouth, into the cavernous
esophagus where Jonah slips down on his way to Tarsis. On your way to Tarsis
you meet against the edge of a dance floor. What does it mean to never learn
a name?—That she must be Eve, and your apple
in the eye, in the eye you eye her with, tames her, like a practiced snake
charmer. When the music ends, she will not follow to fuck in the hills. Her bedmate

is chaos. Her own lover is the ecstasy and the chaos of the dance and she thanks you
sincerely for grinding her drunk body. Her drunken body is a butterfly in a field
on fire. A poppy-field is burning in the minds of the patrons
who want to be put to sleep by a painless arm. Everyone is going home
to forget and the DJ is collecting four-hundred dollars from the exploiters
of Eden. Ha, to think. All the trees are awake, watching, waiting to say
goodnight. There go a couple, three friends, groups, four in a cab. Walkers stagger.
And you, a wanderer, visiting, roam back to the Steppes, alone.

-Zachary Johnson