Summertime, in the city.




Crossing the leafblown excuse for a car-street that runs through the center of the town, I bump into you. You drop something precious with your curses, and I take it and walk away. You never see me again, but you miss that thing the thing that you can't remember. The thing the thing that used to hang at the corners of your laughter and the deep breaths of the warm vanilla AC after sex.
You dearly miss your thing the thing. You blame your lover, you blame the president with his polotik droll, you blame the dog and you even blame the shower.


Your laughter dries up with the summer winds, and the smell of rot and life that drifts off the water only makes you retch in the dead of night. You grow old with the days in August, and come September the bitterness of losing that one thing the thing that you can't remember for the life (and death amen amen amen) of you... it too falls away, and leaves only sadness and obeisity and cable bills dried up on the kitchen counter. Your lover has long since gone away... the president and his war is a liberal's memory... your shower smells like sulfur when you remember to take one in the mid-afternoon heat.


You want it back? I never took it. It was never mine to take, out there on the car-street with the cyclists like honeybees buzzing by and the children singing dark and happy songs. It was never mine to take, old friend. It was only yours to forget with the seasons of your age, to slough off like time on a procrastinator's shoulders.


Happy-ness, you fool.