The Other Side of Solstice

Published “Cirque Literary Journal" Vol. 1, No. 2. Summer Solstice 2010.

Today is the longest day of the year in Alaska and probably other places too where you can walk downtown and get free checking and a chance to win a fishing trip where the sun burns mosquito bites in the midnight sundown day broken and gone like the thought in your head this morning at the stoplight on your way to work behind the woman in the Land Rover doing her “maybe-it's-Maybelline” eyes in the sun visor mirror and the song ends just as the light turns green and you thought you could hold on to your brilliant Thursday desperate-for-a-thought thought but by the time you walk through the office doors and past the carpet-walled cubes and say hello to people whose chairs are now shaped like their asses or maybe it's the other way around you've forgotten your thought altogether and don't even remember you had the thought until almost eleven o'clock when you realize you've been drinking coffee you bought on Tuesday but it doesn't really matter because your thought's gone though maybe just back as far as the intersection to wait for you or hopefully only to the edge of the parking lot where you eat your lunch and maybe you'll find it there on the sidewalk while you finish reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” or the “Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara” which you've been meaning to read all the way through for years and now the idea has caught up with the years and you finish reading the last poem in the book and just want to lie back on the warm sidewalk and take a nap listening to the ravens and finches and wake to find a trail of black ants all over your almost empty cranberry juice bottle and then walk down to the bookstore and find something by some young beautiful writer and fall in love but there's bills so there's work and days and days of eight hours at a time of passing carpeted cube walls and that feeling that you're not you not being or becoming so you close your eyes and feel the warmth of the sidewalk on your back knowing the days are getting shorter now.