Library Square

A dirty middle aged man sits in the Library Square with a half blank ogle of the busy crowd awaiting the morning doors to be opened. In front of him on the pizza cafe' table sits a two litre blue and white older styled thermos, lidless, and filled with what looks like slush frozen iced tea, brown with a thin white frosty film. Two long thin pink/fuchsia straws protrude from the slush layer, buried deep within. The straws split several centimeters apart at the top; one faced toward the grunge laden man as though he had recently breached the beverage as his mornings mission, the other pink appendage faced directly away, as though a malt in a soda shop nervously expecting a soon arrived lover to take it up in pursed lips and stair eyes. However the filth in his long unkempt beard suggested a long day of laborous construction, or idle beggary as he takes long exaggerated sips to prolong the tedious hammerings, or a break from the stinging bite of the grabbing at palmfuls of nails or concrete. The two straws pressed hard together for larger gulps in the coming midday heat of the still un-built home.
The flood gates finally relinquish the dozens of standers by. You can almost feel the flood of knowledge spill out into the vaulted square as if the flood of patrons pushes out learned air which had been sitting the night running slow and cool past the thousands of book shelves, absorbing faint odors of information, only to leak it's way outward.
I plunge deep into the stacks, fully swimming in coffee zest and fluidous pages. The slow creak of compression shelves gliding side to side startles my senses and peaks a curious metaphor not fully resolved yet.
I must drink before i can spill.

Early spring day.

The wiper against the large flat bus' pane repeatedly traces out the peak and arches of a lovers heart for the third straight day in a row. The downpour so heavy that between the intermittent swipes, the gushes run gravity bound to break the heart at it's peak, only to be thwarted off by the incessant chug of two small motors keeping clarity and sustaining the love of the city outside. When my spell breaks from the blades trance, the deep thought of yet another appearance of an, albeit semi-natural, but more forced appearance of that primitive shape, i notice the woman who has just boarded and taken up seating across the aisle directly. She is at a ninety degree angle in a such a way that i can see her clearly by looking straight forward, but she must turn her head to the right to see me clearly. Either way, she seems oblivious to my watching her, perhaps because her eyes seem a bit too close together, as she folds down her umbrella and situates it several times between the seat and the wall, a delicate balance in such a way sot that it is not wetting her leg, nor the seat beside her and yet braced properly as not to fall to the filth of the floor, which threatens to do several times. She seems merely distracted by the umbrella, and not altogether focused upon its safety because most of her attention is focused upon the apple that she is eating. It is a few moments before i realize that she fully intends to eat the entire apple. Now i assume that most people love apples, or a good majority of people anyway, and usually eat the entire apple until it is nothing but a skinny lamppost of a core... all the meaty goodness hiding nestled against the hard cartilaged membrane that houses the seeds arsenic traced seeds , away from the bitterness of the skin, your teeth gnaw and pick at the sweet flesh to enjoy every last tender morsel of what surely keep the doctor away. Not the case here. This woman as if never instructed by her parents to stop at some point when the going got rough, simply plowed through the delicate fruit as though related to a giraffe. Chomping vigorously she bites and chugs clear through the bottom half of the apple until it resembles a muffin top with a small brown twig stuck in the center. I can tell her jaw is labored and working overtime to compensate for the additional breakdown of the solid plant matter. I sat in awe, realizing that by her relative age and vigour that she had been told numerous times in the past by equally bewildered onlookers that appropriate stopping point for most apples. When she got to the end with her index and thumb upon the soft flexible twig she popped the last chunk into her mouth is if it merely had the consistency of a grape. I was relieved to see that as her fingers pulled away from her lips that the stem remained in hand. I thought, well at least this woman draws the line some where. Her primitive instinct never fully abandon. The over head announced "Bay 8 Brentwood station". I didn't look behind me. I had seen enough.