Poetry
Felix Thursday
Church Street
We are waiting
outside the nameless sushi
restaurant on Church Street.
For a too-small table.
To be boxed in by breath
and body heat.
Where, this week,
the too-beautiful people
choose to slum.
But this is where we've always come.
So we wait.
On the street littered with pedestrians.
Where the apartments are stacked
too close, in rows like tombstones.
Where the lampposts' neon halos
blend in with the fog and bus wires.
We are waiting
for the waitress to appear
and count us off like St. Peter.
To get in and get too full and dizzy,
where it smells
like bleach and tea.
In the meantime I'm
imagining San Francisco in pre-history,
glaciers forming its gutters.
Waiting, perhaps, being the greatest
primordial prerequisite.
Humming a requiem to myself.
We are waiting.
While the cold of the city
blows age in our faces.
Vertical ants,
under the stars
that trivialize us.
