which of you was it?

who hunched over sichuan pepper powder, index finger to your nose,

on a Bernal street corner,

who, fleetingly, stared into the naive gummy white-bread eyes

of a commuter on his way to Promethea.

who listens to utopian Nirvana in their utopian Tesla,

who is jealous of everyone living outside their head,

who never embraced the haunted futures,

who was once a time traveler,

who fell and hit his head from a third story window and

forgot the atom bomb

forgot Bukowski’s booze

forgot Ginsberg’s eggs

forgot Kerouac’s blues

and maybe Whitman, too.

Who, last Friday, spent 85 paralytic minutes wandering crumb-less

through digital forests in search of

“the best bluetooth speaker under $100.”

in a virucide-soaked, kombucha-soaked Berkley supermarket

I bumped into a doctor of architecture

who wrote her dissertation on

franchise coffee shops built around internment camps

and

internment camps built around franchise coffee shops.

three packets of microwave popcorn were

all she carried

in her little red basket.

as a child she played in the sun dial’s shadow,

dreaming of scraping the playdough sky

and vacationing on the sunny-side-up moon

and digging to closed-book China

and sucking up the entire reservoir through a neon curly straw.

I spent the rest of the day 

wrestling Zoloft

on the institutional, segmented carpet

and praying

nobody looked at me.