this angel skull of Harlem doesn’t sing or sink like the wind. it’s laundry day in Manitowoc, the MAT is down by the old Navy ship resting in its watery grave and the sky and the rain is so damn gray and sad as I hoist canvas bag over shoulder like some old-time dirty clothes beatnik hobo with wrinkled clothes and wrinkled charms. cigarette smoke burns the eyes at the frantic cross walk, the digital intersection and all those mod bods in the cars have dingy faces glued to smart ass phones. you got to watch the itch they have in their eyes, or they will just run you down. you got to be defensive at all times, a defensive posture and mind that is. no one pays attention except me. some lady comes up to the cross walk with some kid and she gets mean when smoke trails into her face then swirls around her balding child with the bad cough. she talks about asthma or some other respiratory illness and berates me for fogging up the public spaces. she says something about going off by myself to suck poison. maybe over there, she points, a lone picnic table beneath a low branch of a big old pine tree. sit there and suck on that thing is what she says. I answered with a big ol’ I was here first … and she huffed and the light changed and I stepped out into the street and nearly got hit by a car but they slammed on their brakes at the very last last last second and I did not die but instead went to the lone picnic table like that mothering broad said and sat there by myself and watched the dumb world be all mindless and beautiful even so and I just stayed there for a very long time and in the very background I could hear the crashing of the lake waves against the not too distant shore and it made my belly feel real lonely and then it was made worse when the bell tower of some ornate stone church a couple of blocks away started tolling away too and the lonely belly feeling started to feel even lonelier and then it was the dropping sun cracking through the clouds that added to the whole mix of lonely sadness, an Americana downtown’s brick and glass in sunwash light now. that gutty loneliness sweeping me up and getting me all choked up. it was all too lonely to sit still and think about it. I moved on, my bleached canvas laundry tote slung over my shoulder, into a rainbow all wet and smelling like gasoline as a magpie ate paint chips.

By

Aaron Echoes August