Friday, February 18th - "In Which I Imagine a History for the Boy Who I Sometimes See Outside the Drugstore Downtown"

Just after Christmas, unusually

mild weather, and the boy who hung out

by the drugstore every night plying his

wares was plucking chrysanthemums from his

faintly pockmarked pockets, little beauties

frozen there since summer, saved for afternoons

like this one, which seem as ill-fitted

as the too-tight jeans coagulating at his hips,

forcing him to focus his distant gaze

on the rust-colored bricks beneath him,

just to get the passersby to wonder

what could possibly inspire such lack. Across the street,

we played old tropicalia records and

pretended to dance to them, letting the

strange lyrics fall limply at our sides,

along with our listless arms, tattooed

with smoke and cinders from the

burnt pot roast we cooked for dinner,

hoping desperately that we might

have enough left over to eat for days. We

thought about heading across the street to

give some to the boy, who looked so gaunt

that he could live a life inside

his long leather cloak, and whose face

we convinced ourselves we loved,

just because it was a little bit

more damaged than the faces of the

kids we usually met up with downtown, just behind

the highway overpasses where the spiders go to

seek refuge. We thought about inviting him to

join us on our next trip there, so we could

smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with

too much cream and sugar, and discuss political issues which

we don't fully understand, but which make us feel like our

love has a social context deeper than our navels. We

thought about going out there and wrapping him in our

freckled arms, drawing little roses in the air and

asking him to name the stars while we waited and watched,

but instead he headed off languidly

to the dilapidated hotel lobby nearby,

where the lamps are always dim enough

so as not to remind him of how much time

is actually passing away on his eyeballs,

while we were left watching

from the shelter of our leaking roof, hoping

that the flower he lazily dropped

from his aching hands would one day

grow into an entire orchard,

producing juicy peach blossoms sweeter

and more temptingly dangerous than we could ever bear to swallow.