After the Phone Company Layoff

... But somewhere between Malena describing her synethesia and my brother damning the flower guy at the club to the most center level of hell, reserved only for traitors, Nixon and Cheney, I couldn't resist and wrote this in the car on the way home...


After the Phone Company Layoff

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. -- Sir Arthur Eddington

And what becomes of the man who sells flowers
In the tourist district at two in the morning
After the bars have been shuttered,
And the now emptied streets echo a longing?

Will Ed, the bartender still cleaning,
Offer him fingers of bourbon to oil his bones
In that dimmed bar, curtains drawn against knocking
Of the streetlights? When Ed asks that flower-man

How he came to his vocation,
Will the man remember when he was laid-off
From the phone company, how a once disavowed
Gift returned, and he shouldered that burden

His supernatural sensitivity to love,
A synesthesia which confuses love with a certain brilliance?

Will he tell him how he forded traffic's river
Once they were revealed, glistening among the rest of us?
How he lingered on the sidewalk,
Watched their walking away? How their rooted shadows
Tangled into each other and reluctantly followed?
How the woman smiled up at the man,
Twirled the stem between her fingers, oblivious to thorns?

Or would he fret for that couple he chased two blocks,
Crying out Flowers! Flowers! How they mistook
Insistence for madness? How he prays they won't learn late,
Leave behind a birthed and abandoned shining?

I imagine that he will consider these things yet merely shrug,
Gather up his black plastic pail, slouch toward his car.
He will lurch onward to a low, two-story weekly-rate motel
within a constellation of other cheap motels lining the boulevard
Doors opening outward to the flicker and drone of lightposts.

A woman is waiting for him there,
her arms aching for what is left,
each unclaimed blossoming.