For John Votta

I did not know this man. Therefore I feel qualified to eulogize. We are constituted he and I, from the cold air on particular autumn mornings. I saw him on the street corner; he would holler the time, and I would say nothing in reply, maybe a grunt of unassented thanks, but trustless. Perhaps he was an artifact of the village, the Village, where the knots of the square-block city congregated in parades of funny hats.

I am struggling. I knew not the man but the voice as passing strangeness on a certain autumn morning, which drove me to uncomfortable hand-rubbing in the toilet cubicles beside the park. He spoke to the alien worm in my stomach that burrows and calls weirdness from the sky. It says: those clouds are the billowy shapes of your fears, and these veins and scabs are the exhaustive circumscription of your little existence; and it calls back inarticulate through the groans of half-wakers.

As I enter the park, the man is behind me but I build him in my imagination. He walks down to the corner in the burgeoning daylight. Death and struggle collide in his head. Not struggle – the village struggle, always a matter of height, always the 'I Am' in the face of the tall heroic, the infantesque colic, bones broken and feet bound, endlessly walking/negotiating the intersections of height and queer subject formation in the sun-barred back streets. Every morning from the sticky unlatching of eyelids he rebuilds himself, an unsellable story of liver spots and shortness of breath.

Breath is unacknowledged father of performativity. Prior to gendered subject formation, lungs expand and respond to the edges of the air. Perhaps he practices. Non sequitur, the time (the time) and the momentless passing of cars, the imperative Hey, the imperative subject formation directed at one but addressing the other, in a bathroom crucible addressing the passing of the centuries: Hey. Watch the fuck out. Five minutes.

Five minutes snuck up on me with my coffee and leather shoes. I stood, became a walking subject, sloped the ninety-eight steps from bench to staircase, and whisked by the man who had by now addressed his interpellations to other sun-struck denizens of weirdspace. They do not recognize him. I do not recognize him except as an urge to pick at scabs, to bleed imperceptibly. Who the fuck knew?