Dead walked among me. So it felt, yesterday, every day. Daylight. Sleepness. Eyes of strangers.

A woman with no ass crossed 21st Street, eastward, momentarily turning around for no obvious reason. Her lipsticked mouth opened. Sunlight slid across her teeth and tongue. I swear she had two tongues and two crescent-shaped teeth. No ass. Asslessness defined her. She seemed sexless, and safe.

Early, on an obvious Sunday. Sun slipping through mouths like hers, indiscriminately slapping foreheads of the dead and living.

Moments later another stranger, required to be dead but in the moment animated and breathing, for a blind moment intercepted my unstoppable desire to identify the woman tasting sunlight on her tongues. To know her before first words exchanged. Read her story, or even write it. Craft her paths so they lead to mine.

Mental sauces washed through, as they do every minute. Small and smiling, oceans and avalanches start from toy fire hydrants and leaky suns. Watching her head south onto 23rd Street I considered turning back and masturbating onto 21st Street, unaware of its competitive history in that respect. Had hundreds and thousands of men performed that act, left their mark, their hopelessly subliminal aphrodisiac seeking inevitable love from voiceless women who, like most others among us, are required to die.

Living on sunlight and sexlessness I knew at sight she ranked among those who never perish. I wanted her to live forever, surviving on a diet of the dust and sunlight caked on my face, and hands.

I remember none of them now but I read and ate every word thumping through her head. Complete access to every slice of thought left me unable to explain why, in that moment, she had turned around. Why did she open her mouth?

Every word, every unpronouncable rot of inarticulata roaring through her head drowned across me, leaving no explanation, no concordance or even a measly glossary.

Writing naked and unused on 21st Street I watched pointallistic grasps at punctuation, moments earlier inspecting words noising her brain, summarily left to die. Was that meant to be an exclamation point? An emdash? What was the meaning of that unprintable superscript ligature fortifying her otherwise unspeakable, unreadable squalls of raw thought matter?