| Sometimes. Some times. Epigrams of future days and present plays for time; heroes on their knees and villains twirling guns and mustache in panoramas which we freeze into our subconscious mind and later drag up from the depths to mime in desperation when we seek delays.
All this and more. Language stripped of abstract meaning, left with flavor and with shape, pouring through the skeins of neurons in the network of the brain when asked to interpret visions seen perchance (a glance aside?) before the next step taken, pret a porter, showcase of people in the world laid out for our delectation in the daytime sun. Picture, please: street scene. Walking. Crowds there are, and were, and always will be; concrete, steel and dirt all conspire but down below in the interstices of the paving stones a small green sprig grows, fragile, defiant, still yet free in amongst the machines.
People walk to. People walk fro. Some stand, some sit, some wait for others in the flow to stop and speak or just drop pieces of their lives into the cups, and still somehow the rhythm goes. One, two. One two, one two, and through and through, subharmonics in the city's bones and tapdance on the street with the softshoes of radials and aluminum heels.
One such day, one place, one time, one face - one turn missed, and one step taken wrong, which led to stumbling and ending up face-down on cold stressed stone beneath the throng. Distraction exacting laughing price, in skin, in face, in cold-twisted shoulders hunched beneath the coat which instantly feel each and every eye which lands atop the fallen form. An odd number, one man over there wears a patch - that was felt, known, before it was seen, the strangeness of the stares, one eye's weight unbalanced.
Stagger upwards.
She's there.
Her face is framed by murky sky, curls of hair in hazel brown to either side, just the same as when she thrust her appearance into the spokes of the walking stride - but she hasn't moved, still leaning against the lightpole, still smoking the cigarette with cracked nails on her right hand. From this angle, low on the street where the grime has a scent of diesel and of dust, her coat has a fringed bottom ruff of fur and the left hand is gloved in what looks to be velour; there's a button missing from a pair of decorative fixtures on its back.
Slowly in the day, faster in the evening, instantly with the night the face is turning to catch the disruption in the flow; to see the hole in the crowds, move down, travel over the form sprawled below. Any moment now, there will be reaction, action, equilibrium, handoff of an invisible ball which the eyes will follow, from him to her. Will it bounce or roll? Will she laugh or sigh, bring a grimace or a cry, will there be nothing but a passing of their glance, encounter nullified by the merest chance into a blank dead wall in the ever-spreading trees of probability and connection in the city's pulse?
Delay. Delay. Delay.
From here, my glimpse starts at her shoes.
I have so far to go.
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