city heat
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city heat
city heat
105 F in Manhattan
New York street heat can smell like
garbage and piss so a bar looks good
at 2 in the afternoon – an Irish pub,
dark and cool and empty
my eyes adjust to one soul at the long
oak wood runway
Barmaids stretching a towel - both look up
at a European soccer game already played
their conversation long past –(all topics
exhausted)
I leave a two-stool space cushion and order a cold draft
pretending to be interested in soccer
after the silence of three – he goes first
“I’ll be over there soon”
“Where?” I say and she looks down from her boredom.
“Ireland,” he says.
“ No kidding,” I chime.
“You didn’t tell me that,” she adds like –(what’s the big secret and what’s wrong with me)
“Well I ain’t to happy bout goin”
“Why not?” I say to keep the thing going – it’s better than soccer.
“I’m goin with me big family (21 all together) for ten days and we gonna be touring around in a bus all together and I get car sick – you know.”
I think to my self: How’s this guy who likes to sit alone in bars at 2 pm ever going to make it for ten days with 21 people – family no less - and sick in the bus all day long?
I want to tell him not to go and that it sounds crazy but I just say “what you gonna see over there?”
“not sure,” he says “castles, green grass and the Blarney Stone - I guess.”
I just look at him but my look is - I think you are going to go crazy over there.
The barmaid shakes her head and also still a little
miffed that he saved his big thing to tell a stranger and not her after
all the hours and days he sits there - alone.
“I hear if you wear a blind fold you won’t get car sick.”
Now he looks at me like I’m the crazy one.
“Why on earth would I tour Ireland and wear a blind fold and not see my country?”
“Well – will you enjoy it if you feel sick?”
I paid for my one cold beer and wished him god luck and her good bye. Their heads rolled up to the soccer game where the conclusion was already known.
I gave stained doorways and overfilled trash cans a wide birth as I
made my way through the brick oven streets thinking - that conversation wasn’t so bad.
M. Domino
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RE: city heat
I relate to this on so many levels.
nice write Mike!
Bravo!
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city heat
Thanks ! dahlusion !
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To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman, American Poet (1819-1892)