Facing Heat

I smoke. It is a habit I picked up while going to university and well... Sometimes at lunch, overwhelmed by the busyness of my office I go to a little bar on the corner. It's against the law to smoke in public, but this bar has outdoor seating. From the front of "Earth" I light a cigarette over the pretense of lunch in front of me and look around at the people walking; driving; drifting by. Sometimes as they pass a story would whisper to me about where they came from or where they might be going now, so quickly by and deliberately avoiding eye contact.

Usually I sit alone feeling at the same time vulnerable yet cut off from their world. I wonder what I look like to them, to everyone else. I think of my lovers present and past and inhale with the sounds escaping into my head around my blasting headphones the scent of their memories. There is a heat under my skin that rises slowly to the surface then pushes further forcing through the pores in my clothes.Heat has a habit of expanding, expanding into the red and orange paint of the building behind me. It turns the red tiles on the ground into coals burning through my sandals to the soles of my feet and up into me mingling with mine.

Most times I feel I am waiting for something. Maybe a thought that carries me through with it completely, perhaps a poem as secret and burning as I feel in my finger tips. Whatever I'm waiting on perhaps it'll move me along with the world passing me by. Perhaps into one of the stories for me to live along with it and reawaken every time a part of it is told or remembered.

Imagine if you can, the freedom of seeing the world through the largest, most flexible sheet of glass. Imagine the last drops of water on your heating beer. Imagine the whiff of smoke rising from the cigarette, dangling, lengthening ashes on end, suspended between your already burning finger tips...imagine that feeling.

Doesn't it feel like waiting?