This is time as a cistern. The street signs are estranged friends and dillettante guardians; I don't look at them much these days. These are the things that are important to me; the crushed and eroded concrete on every other rounded street corner, the doodling vagaries of the paths leading into the hills, barely following their natural contours, neon downtown, bold and glistening, a trembling illusion, a subverted oasis, a permanent mirage.

I have tamed the menagerie and reduced it to cages, classified it into domesticity. This is some kind of tenuous immortality, the way the noise is endorsed by the silence, the desert ceding its own essence, the foothills like altars upon which lie mixed offerings; pine and fir and pine and fir distilled into the homes of the hermetic wealthy.

Wisdom here is an oracle written in the sand with a finger, a mandala revised by the whims of the wind. And the way it is lit; both by the buildings festooned in lights and the moon, which turns the sand into a mirror, which sees in it its own wicked, blasted surface.