The Tajik walked toward the small Uzbek town. It was twilight. His red moccasins that carry dirt from China to Uzbekistan, his oversized rucksack. In it he carries homemade instruments for sharpening any type of blade, some of his own invention and some copies of what he'd seen used elsewhere.

He finds the woman's home.

The knives displayed on a cloth on the table. He used simple scissors to sharpen them - both sides at once. The boy watched him from behind his mother's leg. Her rugged face, her crisp beauty. She reheats meat and potatoes for him on the stove. She sent the boy off to bed. The Tajik put down the knife and scissors and came up behind the woman. He placed his hands on her hips. He inhaled the back of her neck. No, she said. He went back to the knives.

When he finished sharpening her knives she watched him eat. His graying beard. His dark mongoloid face. How silney he must be to carry around all those tools, she thought.

He finished his food and nodded at her. He sat with his hands on his knees. He waits for her to come near. She does not want to look him in the eyes, but when she does it is the same feeling as last year. He brings her closer. He lifts her shirt and presses his face against her belly. He remembered how she likes to be screwed.

The next morning he is on his way to the town center where the people expect him. They have laid out their knives in preparation for the Tajik who comes once a year to sharpen every knife in the village. He smiles at seeing the old faces though they speak a different language. He and the woman fought in the morning. She claimed that the food and board was payment enough and she owed him not a cent for the blade work. How can I argue, he thought looking at her face. It reminded him that although men have always done as he told them, women are a different story. But why are they a different story. He kicks at the dirt and says to himself, you hated them once, you know.

He stops just short of the village.

The travails of his life. All the times he was robbed before he took to robbing travelers in order to break even. The face of the young man who died at his hands. The boy's earnestness, his eyes which were not quite cold. The Tajik kneeled at his grave for the rest of that day and made camp nearby when the sun set. He owed the boy no eulogy but he contemplated at his grave a while. When it came to him to keep on going he left the grave of the boy who made such a convincing impression of a killer. A body can't know what hunger will make it do.

The Tajik stands there at a point between where he came from and where he's going. He looks up at the sun that will berate the desert after he is long dead, to which his life's journey holds no significance, his life itself being a series of trips across mountains and deserts and valleys to reach people who have something to trade for his one useful skill. The moments of what he allows himself to call love that after all dot his life's journey. If his death will come at his own hand or the hand of another's. It can not be any other way. It must be at your own hand. You never know when the mood will catch you.

The beautiful girl growing up, she was the girl bound to be kissed in the dark.
She sat in history class and dragged her pencil oh so slowly across her lips. Her eyes closed, her breath held, she is lost in the imagined embrace of that boy or this boy. When the bell rang she looked around nervously. She did it again in math class.
She did not know anything until the lights went out and her sister's boyfriend pulled her to him and put his lips on hers. When the candles came out it was long over and they both pretended like nothing happened.
The beautiful girl riding her bicycle fast, her eyes closed and her face open to the embrace of the wind. She steals away with their secret. She lets the bike fall and lays in the grass. She finds herself. Her sister's little smirk makes sense now. She understands her mother's happiness some mornings. She remembers the day of the bloody bedsheet differently, now.
She decides to leave her bike there and tell her parents it was stolen.
She masters the strange art of makeup.
She cultivates her beauty.
She grows into her imagined self.
Love her God now, love her only thought.
Things like college a place for meeting men. Work, a place to practice endearing herself to others.

Oh, a girl's sacred right to grow up to be an adulteress.
She sits in the park. She catches the eyes of men. She can't help it, her curiosity is too strong.
She catches my eye.
I make believe I don't have to be home at the usual hour today. I change my course.
I sit next to her on the bench.
We look out at the evening crowd. These two pirates of the heart set apart from the crowd by our love's ambition. We sit there with racing hearts and enjoy it. It drives every other thought away.
We watch everyone go home. Our stillness. The bench an anchor, we've escaped the pull of the crowd but time persists. We travel in time together, as it were.
The wind begins to pick up. It strained the roots of the trees, it pushed the branches all to one side. Soon the leaves were stripped and the trees bare. The naked trees like wicked hands come up from the Earth with a will to secure something floating on the wind.
The wind stopped like we knew it would and it all settled on the ground. Finally the sun has set.
Our faults, our misdeeds hidden in the dark of the night. We no longer have to make amends.
We turn to each other.

No need for formalities, in the dark.

The woman who works in the cafe and speaks with a French accent is a pervert.
She sits there, one arm draped across the back of the bench seat, and leers out the window at the street.
She is austere about simple things like food and fashion. She demands simplicity. She demands craftsmanship.
She has what you would call emotional ambition.
The only thing that matters to her is what happens when she is naked with a man in a bedroom. You could say it is what she lives for.
She has a man. He is her coworker on week days in another place.
He comes and gets her when her shift is over. She does not greet him with a kiss. She walks him back to his apartment.
He watches her remarkably still, arched back as she walks. He watches her buttocks sway and bulge. Her legs. Her feet wrapped tightly in leather thongs.
She touches you in that way. She brings attention to the motherly bulge of her stomach that distinguishes her from the inconsequential girly women of your past. She lies there naked in your bed and, without speaking, demands that you bring her to new heights of sexual depravity.

The suicide rate of the elderly is rising.

The subway overhead. The train passing over my conscientious, socially connected self.

My body amid the vibrations. Amid the passing bodies of others in the street, I stand in the human highway.

The girl in the cafe fidgets with the paper. She hesitates to read an article she never cared about anyway. She is nervous.

What she looks like when she is making love.

I wonder if I couldn't smooth out her restlessness with my hands on her bare back.

Her less nervous friend shows up. They do everything but hold hands.

This deviant standing at the cafe window.

My socially unacceptable stillness in the middle of the highway, my boss's anger at my lateness.

I do not ease her angst.

The children of the street, they play the roles that the street reduced them to. The two tall boys watch over the gang. They are the dispensers of the glue, they are the ones who do the beating. The bodies of the smaller children resilient little recievers of discipline. They bruise and heal back up again out here on the unforgiving street. The fiber of their being originating from whatever resources the street alots them, even out here life persists and a heirarchy is formed. The children of the glue in your garden. Learing at you through eyes unlike your child's. Your garden gnome, a noose aroud his neck, hangs from the tall dark haired one's wrist. They lick their silver glue-stained lips and salivate over the delicious food in your refrigerator.

The secret rage of the handsome drifter and all the damaged men aimless on the Earth. His filthy but whole slacks, his skinny ankles. His cheap games. He lives in your capacity to be ripped off.

In his past, days spent in the company of a naked woman. Days spent submitting to her sex. Slimy textures and aromas of fermentation. He remembers these days with casual ease to you, but truth be told he wakes up every filthy morning longing for the cheap love of a whore.

The poor Indian who lives in the shanty house

Who loves a drink during the day, but is a pleasant drunk

Lives like an animal whose hunting methods can not be surmised.

Who is assumed to live off the sun.

Skimming some margin of substance from the vastness

That we can’t see a living to be made off of.

He comes from a time when two legged creatures crowded under the sun.

They put their inside lives into things such as wagons.

And they lived as if inside outside, against the outside.

Danger to them was from everywhere.

They were always filthy and they all sang the blues all their lives.

Gods of nature watched them from the hills

Like the sun, and they felt like the sun.

What is it in these indefatigable creatures

That made them want to win against us - and let them win.

This narrow wagon train in the valley, this ant line creeping

That belies eastern armies will spread and toil in the West

In slow agony. In filthy poverty.

To make something out of nothing to make nothing out of us.

Something that was once beautiful. Something

That was glorious by every definition of the word.

Something such as that which cannot exist.

That walked through the plains radiating masterfulness

Was not truly so to the force of nature that brought this great enemy upon us.

Was not truly so to this animal who cannot exist.

There is a particle of Myth contained in all our lives.