Original Poetry Forums

city heat

07-23-2012 at 11:48:58 AM

city heat

city heat


105 F in Manhattan
New York street heat can smell like
garbage and piss so a bar looks good
at 2 in the afternoon – an Irish pub,
dark and cool and empty

my eyes adjust to one soul at the long
oak wood runway
Barmaids stretching a towel - both look up
at a European soccer game already played
their conversation long past –(all topics
exhausted)

I leave a two-stool space cushion and order a cold draft
pretending to be interested in soccer

after the silence of three – he goes first
“I’ll be over there soon”

“Where?” I say and she looks down from her boredom.

“Ireland,” he says.

“ No kidding,” I chime.

“You didn’t tell me that,” she adds like –(what’s the big secret and what’s wrong with me)

“Well I ain’t to happy bout goin”

“Why not?” I say to keep the thing going – it’s better than soccer.
“I’m goin with me big family (21 all together) for ten days and we gonna be touring around in a bus all together and I get car sick – you know.”

I think to my self: How’s this guy who likes to sit alone in bars at 2 pm ever going to make it for ten days with 21 people – family no less - and sick in the bus all day long?

I want to tell him not to go and that it sounds crazy but I just say “what you gonna see over there?”

“not sure,” he says “castles, green grass and the Blarney Stone - I guess.”

I just look at him but my look is - I think you are going to go crazy over there.

The barmaid shakes her head and also still a little
miffed that he saved his big thing to tell a stranger and not her after
all the hours and days he sits there - alone.

“I hear if you wear a blind fold you won’t get car sick.”

Now he looks at me like I’m the crazy one.

“Why on earth would I tour Ireland and wear a blind fold and not see my country?”


“Well – will you enjoy it if you feel sick?”


I paid for my one cold beer and wished him god luck and her good bye. Their heads rolled up to the soccer game where the conclusion was already known.

I gave stained doorways and overfilled trash cans a wide birth as I
made my way through the brick oven streets thinking - that conversation wasn’t so bad.


M. Domino

01-22-2013 at 12:47:51 PM

RE: city heat

I relate to this on so many levels.

nice write Mike!

Bravo!

05-21-2014 at 06:18:36 PM

city heat

Thanks ! dahlusion !

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA