Third Space

It did not die loudly.

No shattered windows or chairs stacked in mourning

No last song rose from the jukebox

with its throat full of coins.

It simply dimmed.

.

First, the cafe forgot the names it had been keeping warm.

The woman behind the counter vanished

like steam from a chipped blue cup,

and the glass lamps went blind

one by one.

.

Then the bookstore became a bank.

The diner, a white room for teeth.

The bowling alley, with its constellations

of shoe-spray, neon, and cigarette ghosts,

was gutted clean and lifted into 'luxury'.

A rooftop firepit burns above it, decorative, warming no one.

.

There used to be places

where loneliness could enter

without being searched at the door.

Where a man might sit for hours over coffee lifeless and cold,

where old women folded their gossip,

and children slipped between tables

as if the whole town had agreed to raise them.

.

There were basements that smelled of dust and orange drink.

Parks where men argued with chess pieces and

Corner stores with softlyl lit aisles,

lost cat poosters curling at the corners,

and candy behind the glass.

.

We belonged there

without a password.

Without a purchase large enough to justify a chair.

.

Now even rest has a price.

Now every tables shines brightly with polish.

Now the music knows our names but no one else does.

.

Still, sometimes, in the blue hour after the rain,

I heear the old world breathing.

.

Perhaps it gathers in laundromat windows,

in the silver spin of strangers' clothes.

It flickers under bus shelters,

in the shared silence of wet shoulders.

It hums beneath library carpet, under the footfalls of those

who have nowhere else to go.

.

Not gone.

Ghosted.

Thinned to a veil

we pass through

without knowing what touched us.

So I mourn the place that never was one place at all.

.

A spare chair. An open door. The light left on past closing.

A small, merciful country

where anyone could come in from the weather and be, for a while,

less alone.