When you get the mean reds.

Walking my boy late at night with whisky in my mug, and on the sidewalk I pass someone a few years younger than me singing an old punk song--actually, sneering it, a spat at the air between herself and her next steps--with her face painted, streaked black like a spiderweb or some KISS tryout. And she is carrying an umbrella and a stereo, with great and long, thin sheets of plastic tucked into her ball cap, whose beak is upturned. I nod as she interrupts those lyrics to say hello.

And curiously, on my way back homeward she is a block ahead. I can hear her shouting toward nothing, even her muttering is loud enough. I pause when she stops for a moment to trade the stereo's hand for the umbrella. When she starts again she swaggers, tapping that umbrella on the concrete to flare its grey up with attitude. Like seeing a sashay out of Breakfast at Tiffany's, though her song streaming back has changed to those do-do-do's from "Low Rider," and nodding my head at that, because everyone deserves that feeling up there.

The only desert within our means.

One evening not long ago, while walking through the park I saw an old man in clean shirt and slacks pull up to the curb and calmly walk over to a young tree. He leaned down and scooped his grocery bag full with mulch, then placed the bag into his trunk and drove down the street.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a woman crouching in the thick heat and following a pigeon as it hopped along the sidewalk, she trying to pour water onto it out of a plastic bottle.

This morning I listened to the basement dwellers beneath me argue about something that got lost as words progressed, becoming a drone about the other's persistent argument and nag, both voices sharing the perfect moaning characteristic.

And I sit beneath a ceiling fan, watching its strings push, my little one flopping over in his sleep and letting out his little dog groan. Holding a book and alone in this apartment, I miss my lips and spill coffee on my shirt with no one to see.