One Seat

Pull door open, Friday, High Hat, Freret New Orleans

Head phones, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson biography

Ironic Zen, Dylan, Ram Dass, sleek iPod Nano audiobook

The look of the please-be-seated assessment

Is one alone, holding a copy of the Once and Future King in hand

As a dining mate, to please the logistics, the mathematics

To seat a human at the bar, starring at open tables for more

Says I do not have anything right now, but you can sit…

Oblige to the tender, professional solo diner

Knowing this is normal, the rambunctious rabble den

The outings of discourse in ordering and imbibing

The evening of release, a reward of company and observer status invisibility cloak

The soundlessness in the symphony

Noticing and unnoticed tremors, energy surges in reaction

The pulse of presence, of nutrient acquisition

In peeling the jawbreaker angels and impish forces of the naked recess

Cloaked in coquetry and companionship

A mother plays with her daughter who cannot sit still

Sweater in the December night duckling under a table

I order flounder with paprika grits and crispy broccoli over a sweet potato puree

A pale ale draft, jingle bell earring waitress behind the bar

A seventy-something gay couple waiting for take-out order a Dewar’s and a Chablis

Quartet of twenty-something females scanning big eyes like a bumble bee’s flapping wings

Fold my prosthetic teeth into a napkin

Read through fifty pages with the Wart learning about spears and boars

The safeguards of protruding sideways to prevent a pierced charging animal from splitting a man

Ants in hills taking up legion for Merlin to deliver magic

To make boys believe the world is a cup of possibility

Drank yoga earlier in the evening in twenty-six postures once over

Fire introspection toe stand the portal inside a man’s head

The thoughts in humid heat, ancient languages, and crinkled time

To smile into a limpid mirror through illusions laughing like a phoenix being born

The ash of sweat to crack union with alone and together how to do both, be both

We are continually born and reborn, birth is not a singular event

Memories of lives we have forgotten we lived, taken like whispered beautiful ravens

And the touch of a mother washing a son’s bloody shirt in the cold water of a kitchen sink

Forgetting what you think you know, what is gone, what is present

A fork, fish and vegetables to a mouth, soft and palatable

Unanswered phone calls and remembering it is not your fault you did not do anything wrong

That portable warmth one carries intractable no matter the shelf of the universe, one is