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Crab claw casserole, wharfing it down, downtown in a waterside café. It’s a clean and crisp day—a very nice place. A mist is astray in the streets, drawn from the bay by the heat of the city, and in this café at a table there waits, a man with no name and a very clean plate.
The patio awning stretches to where the exit is looming and the ocean just stares. Blanketed here, the patrons that gather tear out their hair and share lunatic laughter. All the boards creak as they move in the mist, dodging the sun like bored masochists. But they’re drunk and don’t notice the blind, smiling tortoise seated in lotus. It is not until the mist has dried and the sun has depleted that the lunatics become disdainful believers. The tortoise knows not how they look when they laugh but can feel the pulsations as it moves through the grass. Later, in a soup, mush mouths throughout the café slurp the enlightened turtle in endless ignorance.
The savory sauces swish and slide around in their mouths and the time on clock hasn’t changed in over an hour. No one notices between bites. The sound of sizzling drowns out the clock’s ticks and smoke permeates the packed café. There is little conversation; only bustling smacks of gluttonous gums are heard.
The massive mouths are chewing and chewing; mechanical things liquefy the hamburgers and hotdogs and pastas and pizzas, all too large to be taken down wholly but taken as quickly and carelessly as possible. Taste is not important to these fat mouths that make no time to taste anything at all and disregard the clock on the wall. It hasn’t ticked since those two men visited the café for lunch but did not eat, and instead sat and had a conversation at a booth near the window, each drinking many glasses of water; the clock still reads 2:42.
Their nature had somehow disturbed time, seemingly stopping it, but not the fat-bodied, meat-stuffed mouths—they kept on their ravenous spree to devour everything they’d ordered from large, thick menu pages, bound together with horsehair. The menus were rough like elephant skin and very well could have been. Countless palettes go and come, looking in and out of those menus, licking their lips at the large pictures of protein packed dishes, large hunks of meat slathered in savory red-orange sauces and stuck with scratch and sniff stickers to seal the deal—not that these mouths needed to be sold on anything. With them, it’s a matter of mass and intake, not taste and texture; it’s all the same to those tongues. The sidewalk cafes summon those tongues. They pump the aroma of cooking meat through pipes that lead to drains in the street, covering it in a warm hammock of delicious steam—succulent, sticky steam, an alluring smog of stewed and steamed meats from every animal imaginable.
There was no end in sight before the men who weren’t hungry showed up in broad daylight at the café on the corner where the gutters are clogged by congealed fat and blood, stuck and mashed with leaves and trash washed from the street where cars never pass without stopping, their windows down, their grills wafting the steam of the flesh as it cooks in the belly of the café. Way in the back in the basement, the scent rises through the floorboards, fills and pulls itself through pipes as if drawn by the nostrils of godheads and exhaled upon a world of round bodied fat mouths. That is when I saw her. She walked alone down the street, her heels stepping over the gutters of gunk with an elegant grace. The two men watched her, sipping water and talking, stopping time in the café and smiling in a suspicious way.
I saw her cross the street, swing sunbeams off her hair, and walk into a place I’d never seen before. The place was quaint, across the street, with a façade that brought warm memories. There inside she took a seat with her face above confectioned sweets that lined the inner windowsill, while outside bloomed gold daffodils.
I smiled, hoping she would see me there, across the street, seeing her hair. She twirled the locks in thought, I thought, about the beans and cream she bought. How warm it must feel—the tongue, the throat, the stomach’s seal; the candy coated windowsill; the sunny spot upon her cheeks; the stings of needled humming beaks.
Then her bovine eyes met with mine across the street in sights divine. A single chord of light bisected the passing traffic it neglected. Our conjoined stares resist the flutters of stale rain splashing from gutters lining the street. The sidewalk on which I see my feet in motion toward that place wherein she sits, in spite of me, in spite of the place that I have chosen, across the street, where time is frozen, is nearly empty. Entranced by forces so magnetic, the clock is calmed by this aesthetic. In haughty denial the clock has cooled, resisting time’s tyrannical rule. Contained within, the eyes of fools are smothered in glaze of sugary sunlight and honeydew haze.
Time is tightly woven in her locks of golden hair but time is not conditioned to exist as just a stare; it is not there, there cannot be, as beautiful a sight as she. But she, to me, exists as such—a timeless gem in a flawless hutch. And I’d like much to burglarize, but what a shame it’d be to touch the stone, and forever change the light it shone.
Besides, my feet are useless now; they cannot walk, they’ve forgotten how; thoughts have halted, altered action, convinced ideals of their attraction. Standing still, the sturdy street is hoarding traction from feet that seek its satisfaction. A bustling bastard is the street, impeding untaken steps in history, sediment left as mystery. And there was she, and here was me, across the street, in some place, eyeing her ferociously, admiring her face and the collection of her teeth.
Casual cowardice suppressed this hunger, addressed the source and fed it doses, prolonging longing ever longer; slow defeat by self-hypnosis. But it’s her, the source, the cause of my affliction, yellowiest on the sill of daffodils, I’d say with much conviction. Thinking of her image as merely a mirage, I closed my eyes to see her better in memory’s hodgepodge. Her golden locks engulfed my face in fabricated memories. Chewing a piece of golden lock, my false teeth are flossed, absorbing the electric shocks, ecstatic of the memories time had never clocked. To look at her behind closed eyes is to see beyond the façades of places wherein she hides in casts of silhouettes against the glass.
But now, the daffodils have all decayed on the windowsill where they were placed, planted in pots, positioned for plucking passers to try and best their luck, pick apart the petals, and count the love-me-nots, to calm the mind before it rots, to buff and shine these eyes that think there is no reason for eyes to blink. A fluttering fickle heart is chained, its wings are clipped its pulp is drained, while time observes in cold disdain, cringing at what soul remains.
And now, she’s gone; I missed her exit, somewhere, along this street of thought on which shoddy springs have bounced and stopped, affront this lonely, dessert shop. This place chose me and she chose hers, like alleycats choose alleyways that echo when they purr.
But now she’s gone; gone somewhere in slight consciousness and meditative bliss, escaping through some gap in reason with her bag of tricks. She must’ve shrugged those yellow locks, the wetted dewy kisses of dawn and misty yawning clocks, alarmed by the embodiment of charm dangling from stocks, and here I sit like a slimy slug wedged, hidden between the rocks. Is this where I belong, in some place across the street on the surface of a gong? What have I done wrong to let her get away? Perhaps I let the daffodils helplessly decay in awe of their display, of turning toward the sun and asking it for rain, when the streets have all been flooded from a busted water main. But there, in pots, they live and die on cement sills with stubborn pride, despite the chance to uproot their stalks and accept the dance from stranger’s knocks. The reverent remain in patient thirst for beauty’s grace to address them first.
Survival of the pacifist; arrival of the masochist, pleased by sunken battleships, powerless to the hourglass with syrup as its catalyst, lying heavy as a brick at the bottom where the sand is falling quick. I feel the weight upon my chest and take its force with renewed zest, as falling sand becomes glass from pressure-heated esophagus, a windowed view for things that pass. There, through time, the heart does laugh at love observed through polished glass. Pressured sand hardens as glass, regardless of daffodil gardens. Love is just a greenhouse gas, fogging time’s window, begging for its pardon.

I have dreams of waking during dreams of drinking water.
It seems that something has happened to my wakefulness,
so I wake and walk to the sink for a drink of water.
I drink the water and wait to fall back asleep or wake up from the dream and drink some water.
I think it over;
I ought to go back to bed.