No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
The next town was small, slow, and quiet. The skyline was bare and only steeples broke its plane. There was no traffic. The people were mostly older and paid little heed to William as he followed along the storefronts. He came to an alleyway behind a strip of restaurants where two older men sat on food crates. Cut jean shorts, yellowed tank tops. They looked up at him and then one of them waved him over. “Do you have a extra cigarette?” asked the man.
Readers operate under precedent. What you have read before causes a spin towards what you are reading now. Universality might be what you should read now.
Somewhere in Nova Scotia, at a battered laminate-top bar, in a wood panelled tavern that smells of spilled beer, urine, and the leftover odour of bagged cigarettes, sits a sixty-two-year-old man with wispy white hair that scraggles out in thin stands from beneath a black ballcap, featuring the nondescript logo of a company that he’s never worked for.
two words
Kirsten laughs. How do you do it?
Do what?
Think about depressing shit all day. I can’t even watch a David Attenborough without getting upset.
...To admit to the world, that you might just be a person who knows a little, but not a lot...