I emerge from the train each morning and remember that the first thing to do, always, is to swipe my card on arrival, or else they’ll charge me a fee and I’ll have to email people to get it fixed. It takes time to do those things, so I remember to swipe the card at the reader. Then I walk out onto the street. Usually not in too close a proximity to anyone, but sometimes, especially on game days, it can be crowded. I think about some people who do all sorts of walking and getting near others in the course of their days and then think about having a nine-to-five gig someplace far away from a city. How boring it must get, but how serene. I’d invariably select a desert location. The summer and its bleeding into autumn would make me wish I was elsewhere.
If I catch the early train I’ll see the girl with big sunglasses standing to the left of the bus stop. Her face will be down toward the phone in her hands, which she rests against herself as she reads or types. She’ll have a bit of a double chin and a cute, distinct nose that pokes out and makes me appreciate her in profile, the only way I see her.
Poetry, as I understand it, is an assortment of words in an appealing order, chosen and arranged to say a thing in a different way than one might usually say it. “We Real Cool” comes to mind when I’ve got poetry on the brain, because my old writing professor—only writing professor I suppose—loved to read it and assign a “We Real Cool”-style poem. I don’t recall any of the poems of that sort that I wrote, or any of them at this time, but I’ll sometimes think that I’d like to write one about the profile girl to the left of the bus in the shadow of the brick building next to the pharmacist’s.
The truth is the nose reminds me of someone. The bulbous end, little bump along the crest, a length that I like but that some people think is not conventionally attractive, at least not for the magazines or the ads which are mostly of a certain kind of white woman. I think it’s a good nose.
You see some noses in life, like those of beautiful girls in profile, and you think, yours is a really fine nose. Thinking too much about these things is part of the problem, maybe, but that applies to everything.Thinking too much about these things is part of the problem, maybe, but that applies to everything.
Lately, about two months, there’s been an ad for a bed store or a store that sells soft, fluffy things, just on a tall brick wall next to a corner bar and coffee house. The ad is about a story and a half high. It has some words in a script that I’ve never bothered to read. The image is of a woman in bed, lying on her side, with a pristine white comforter or quilt pulled up over her shoulder. Her hair is long, a brunette base with streaks of gold like lots of people do. You can’t see her face at all on account of it. It sprawls across her face, shoulder, and beyond across her back and onto the bed. It reminds me of the section of a beautiful hand-crafted wooden clock between three o’ clock and six o’ clock, where the varnished lines extend out from the center of the clock to the far reaches. It’s long, thick, pretty hair. Sort of thing that a man can really love to hold.
Both the profile girl and the ad appear at about the same few moments during my walk. One of them, the ad, I keep forgetting to take a photo of. The other, the person, I’m too afraid to do anything about.