Pretext

Walking all the way down Spring St., toward Lake Washington*- here, Seattle. It is summer, but there is no Summer St., Spring suffices. I walk through Madrona in the sun, past mansions, over a rickety wooden pedestrian bridge that crosses the Madrona Ravine. I am twenty-four and of no consequence. My thoughts are mercurial vapor, drifting clouds of "aspect psychology* and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the car I drove in to day-care- those small years of my young life, that black chick that broke my heart on foreign soil, those dreamless morbid days of my return home a few years back, Che Guevara and his motorbike, and that dream I had last night about having a stomach of maggots that came up through my abdomen like popped zits, ach".
I find the beach of the Monarch Butterfly, somewhere in Madrona, along a cove of the lake. There, a thicket of bamboo sways in the breeze, and a dozen butterflies mate in the sand, wings fluttering by my squinted eyes. I feel like I am a creature in the early stages of sentience- just a creature like all the rest.