“A Space for a Dog”

Two men waited in front of a store. Or, one would think it was a store. There was actually no sign, no indication of the edifice’s rudiments. Either way, the outside seemed to be more happening than the inside.

One of the men was black and one was white. But they seemed on an equal plane — the black man was not comparatively sociologically subjugated, the white man holding no postural aloofness.

At the bus station, a block away, an array of people scathed with dissatisfaction, for reasons less unapparent than unsavory. The bus station’s theoretical undesirability was complimented by a bilious social field surrounding, glares and stasis, the stasis compounded by the impending public change in location during a sameness of state.

Up the street a little bit, there were buildings with signs on them, and another without, with just an address in stuck-on, labeled letters. Similarly to the other frontless station, this locale harbored joviality, the elderly, who are more similar to black people, verbally lithe and unprotected. An architectural charm was summoned by the very skeletons of the buildings on this street, and revenue abounded, but these elderly men stood in defiant, light satisfaction, ironically disarmed and joyed by the new, the developing.

Overall, this was a block where the wealthy, the established were non-sexual, uninteresting.

A bank divided the nearest diner to the South, and the bus station. The bank divided the seeking and the sought, the needy and the needed. The bank had survived violence, gunfire in the de facto warzone, and there was so much to say South of the bank, so little to say North of it.

Yet, it’s our problems that unify us. Leisure time is the most difficult about which to verbalize, explaining the proliferation of video games and TV programs.

Everything shouted near the bus station was truthful, and useless, everything uttered South of the bank was esoteric, and invincible.

I had this new style of hip-hop I was going to do, with a xylophone, It was a little different, because I wouldn’t be holding the microphone, I’d be holding mallets. In a way, it was antithetical to the idea of hip-hop, but then, so was a wine bar. So was the absence of anger.

“I don’t have to try to act tough” I shouted… “From the looks I get I’ve seen / And I’m prepared I’m aware.”

The xylophone lines were in major chord, and manifested during vocal breaks.

The old men were superlatively satisfied with my performance. Elsewhere around the bar, there were men of younger age but older disposition, engorged by more money, and they didn’t hold exciting countenances. It was like they saw my whole life, they saw death, that’s why their hands didn’t shake, that’s why they surrounded themselves with crowds in the first place. I thought my artistic expression might be a little more valid if I had rabid teeth, and jaundiced gums, and ran around drooling on the patronage. I mean, you might as well get out with it.