Every coffee shop in the world

What we have here is a grey Burnaby day that could just as well be a grey day anywhere in the world.

What we have are great heaps of mist and cloud that could stand in for all the sorrow in the world.

And rain, well, rain always weeps from eyes the size of  continents on ground already wet by weeks.

It leaches away the last happy memory—that childhood memory you had stupidly stored away for just such a day—so that you want to hide your face behind a vacant grin not unlike all the vacant grins in this long line of bipeds who come here to this coffee shop, with the awning the colour of mould, out of nostalgia for a life not their own and to avoid the inevitable moment when they have to snatch up their mildewing umbrellas and catch a bus to their meaningless jobs.

And with your mind damp and tamped down into this morning-born-old you reach the place where you finally decide, here in this AM that is every AM in the world, to stand on your chair and shout into each hollow eye that this is how emptiness smells. That meaning, a solitary laughing occupant, has left on the last sky-train…you know, in case no one noticed.

But who knows how these things work, who knows how the dry bump and lurch of things turn to cool flow.

Who was the first to say in-the-nick-of-time?

Because what we have here is a waitress who stops the line and moves from behind the counter to help balance a cup of coffee in the hand of a man in a wheel chair, who wheels through the door to take his cigarette and coffee.

And what we have here is a young Arabic man wearing a bright blue bandana who leaves his place under the awning to retrieve a napkin from inside and wipe up spilled coffee from the shirtfront of the man in the wheelchair.

What we have here is not time, we are not in time we are in soul, there is no time here.

What we have here in this coffee shop that has an address and is every coffee shop in the world, is flesh ensouled and the mists of God.