Flat White Afternoon

Forget about it for you’ll never win, never hit the jackpot, move in to a solar-powered eco mansion and modest philanthropy, become a panjandrum of diaphanous pleasures but must sink or swim beneath mood- mutable skies, coconut milk clouds, in the shadow of high flats, low sales, bright fronts, strung crowds of literally miraculous people in expensive skin like bed sheets you would wrap yourself in and which you now touch lightly as you enter this café past a clutch of mitching schoolgirls with pierced noses and Tintin hairdos who look at you as if to say is it dial-a-dickhead day in here? or maybe that’s aimed instead at the guy eating flatbread with five thousand friends on his phone who types with a grin all is well with the world, when all is not well with the world — the burden of debt as your granny might say heavy as sin — although who would begrudge this incense of crushed coffee in steam this clatter and chatter latex flowers under halogen lights and who’d demean that woman with her small child wiping the small child’s chin to the delight of a lonely well-off older person or w.o.o.p. — I believe they call them woopies — at the next table over who scoops two shaking spoons of sugar into a steaming cup then begins to call her son Oh my lost Son asking after her granddaughter while the mitching girls swagger out the door — look, one forgot her phone — ah good, someone caught her — and who would begrudge the yin and yang of this moment sitting here coming or going anyone and no one here or somewhere else stuck nowhere and flowing in the mix like everyone for you are blurring below indigo and ink-dim skies as time passes by like steam vapors into the run-of-the-mill gray coat you put on pausing, before leaving to meet this falling day which as your granny might say is the only day you’re in.