The desktop clock, which is shaped like a clock tower, has been around for as long as I can remember. Last fall when I last visited here it had malfunctioned, and he asked me to fix it, change the battery. 

The clock had all but stopped again; here again, alone, in my parents' home, I search for another AA. The second needle of this paltry clockwork starts to tick again after the replacement, as though his room resumes life. 

His desk faces out the eastern window. In the distance is the shore, where the sun or the moon sometimes rises. The view he loved so well. The many photos he took, posted, sent to me via messenger. I have a collection of these photos from throughout the seasons and the years.

Those who rely on the angels a little too often. I disembodied my father from his suffering body if because his faculty to verbalise his interiority had become irretrievable. Now the alternative timelines are as relentless as the toss and turn when the night befalls sleepless upon me. I am become the sea of remorse.

Stone the mirror of the matrices that have spawned my being into his life, as I am unable to rescue him from the confines of life support. Instead curse myself out of it all. To indulge in all the earthly delights that he is deprived of as he lies in hospital bed not unlike I used to the very first days on Earth. In a diaper with my spine against gravity, away from the sun, away from the cypress and the soil. Months since he had tasted anything but the sterile stench and dried disease hour after hour. The pandemic measures still in place; no visitors but the sole nurse, a duty I relieved myself after 30 hours, for my convenience and the livelihood of some unconscionable wage worker. 

Life without Music. Delicacies. Soothing fragrances. Without family. His last days were deprived of all that made who he had been. Nobility, mobility, sweet tooth, books, internet, eye for the celestial bodies, the voices of his own family. 

My striving for extraordinary life is now reduced to the lay and the vulgar. Like most of you, whom I despise for your indolence and poverty of touching imagination. I am become like you. And here my own narcissism dissolves into self-hatred. Fuck you, I shall collapse onto you, break myself down and drown you in saltwater. 

 whatever i saw in the mirror, saw me

everyday becomes louder with cicadas in July

 Technology that named itself

Like their namesake the quotidian shapes culture. As jeans in particular are a timeless classic which makes an eternal return, they believe _______ expresses a function of their ambitious nature to become a new symbol for the past