Filed under: Poetry
A cup of wayward patrons – Archie and his ramshackle gang of Mr. Thirsty and Sleeping Beauty, backing up our loveseats.
“I like this weather, you know, I like it, it’s better weather than we’ll have in June – too hot, you know, it’ll get too hot.”
pity nods, pithy laughter from backstrange miestro, barely directing, rather subjecting his audience to the burden of a reality, far from spectacular.
“I used to work in Texas, right on the Alamo. In Dallas it would get hot, out on the Alamo. With the Indians.”
“But that was the seventies,” he breathes stories like smoking embers, dying in the good light.
“Oh yaahhh,” – her response could be written like a spent sigh of unlatched sensation.
But I am no false front house, you see, hanging on his every word, and wondering at the listening potential of much younger ears set upon this sight sore man.
“You’re looking beautiful today,” he jingles, turned. Unthreatening, his quips are hardly overgrown on hollow ears.
Archie moves to the front, sits in the sun and rambles with Dylan’s shadow, so much more a sinewed spider of a man than we remember in our yesterdays. He wraps his books in plastic bags, he wrapped them before the great debate on plastic. It keeps them from the rain. Today it rains everyday – tomorrow it may be less.
Talking about Toronto – they agree that Vancouver is a good city, though one is nodding purely out of blithely minded patronage.
“Forty years in Toronto – I’ve had enough of Toronto, HA ha HA – but I made good money, I made fifty thousand dollars a year.”
A victim, he is the working man.
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