He slowly descends down the gullet,
squeezed with the crowd through the stomach of the ground floor,
excreted into the night
like dim stars, ravished by the moonlight.

The wind on the plaza rejects him for the three-hundredth time.
He sits, collar raised,
staring the moths beneath a streetlamp.
A voice on his left says:
"The night is too short."
He replies:
"You look like my father."

Suddenly the wind shifts. A woman passes—
even the light nearly shatters.
He cannot recall her face.
Perhaps it was the curve—
his vision drifts all the way into the darkness.
His thoughts begin to wander.

But never toward the womb—
unless a man has eyes in the fourth dimension.

Dec 1, 2023