This thing called a soul is strange, it needs to be tested; it’s the substance that emerges when the body wrestles with the brain.

I wonder if anyone thinks about the soul anymore. If they think about searching beyond internal horizons. Behind the line that demarcates personality.

Right now I see a homeless man asleep in the corner of the train. Everyone on the subway car stares at their phones.

It’s 9:15pm. A Thursday night. Completely unremarkable.

I wonder too, how I got here: this city, this era, this subway car. Often I make eyes with women on the platform — before being funneled onto separate train cars. Erotic life is always an illusion: an illusion by definition.

The reality is the soulless mechanism of this post-industrial city passing us through its bowels: digesting us.