17 May 2008

Summer Day, Greenlake

I leave with the sun in the same place
On the horizon of my mini-blinds

I walk north, no time for the rose garden
only the briefest moment with the animal smells

I rush the water.
I keep the lake at my left shoulder
and watch the sun and then the moon

I watch women burn down the path
and call me a misogynist but I still
think they look best in pink or white tank tops

But it’s surprising hard to draft after
a particularly nice ass so I drop back—
I walk pretty fast though

Walk, see people pass, leaving my headphones on high
Don’t want to hear any sirens
The pop is Swedish
I’m dancing I’m invisible

I cross the Scots tennis team once, then again—
at the center of the phalanx a girl’s mouth makes
the shape of “Then she said—”

A golden retriever getting hit in the head with a plastic bag
of its own shit every second step

I’m not yet the guy with grey armpit hair
staring down the women keeping a hula hoop
afloat on her waist while walking

I’m not yet the man rollerblading with the aid
of modified ski poles

The backstretch of the lake is getting dark
my sweat cools my back tightens
I scroll back to older beats

At the point where I started
children skitter across the shore
They’re laughing they’re gamboling
They involve themselves in foam footballs and Canadian geese

It’s dusky and getting uphill and I don’t want any water
I want “Billie Jean” I’m putting one foot more directly in front of the other
I’m rolling my shoulders I’m missing beats
Someone in the woods might hear one or two “woo!”s

Fuck it I’m almost home and I hear my heartbeat
in my ears and “Smooth Criminal.”
A block off the main road I give it a sideways slide

I go inside to make my hierarchy and look back and all I see
is an exuberant Boston Terrier leaping off the twilit edge
of the path at a cloud of gnats—its owner
looks, understands and lets the leash go—

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