Breakfast in the park

A windy day of nothing to do.

The overcast pall of sunrise had congealed itself upon morning’s doorstep and now weakly began to illuminate the lower-lying clouds that stuck to the horizon’s edge like porridge clinging to a kitchen sink.
Dissatisfied with stillness, the wind exhumed a stagnant patch of air and flung and it carelessly across the city, whipping havoc into the cafe belt and hurling a myriad of paper napkins into the street as if they were wilting leaves, plucked from the branch and sent off into ether.

The Polis carried on, ever drifting with the moods of the traffic below and the populous that gave it life; a bustle of brick and pavement, condensed into an erratic movement of inorchestrable harmony; the street-sweepers that dance around the parked cars and drunks at rest in the gutter, the youth that cross a road without looking, these people know the Polis, they live and breath its intricacies, now so commonplace they’ve become natural.
The sandstone walls of an older time lay unmoving, ever-pocketed by gradual erosion. Copper stencils denoting an old business name or street address, now dulled to obscurity and flaked with the seams of growing patina.

It wasn’t filthy, not even the oil slicked burn-off from Smokestack no.2 could land upon the ground with any real purchase.
This city was more dusty than anything really, A land laden by granular patches of particularised detritus so prevalent that it felt as if marbles had been strewn across the footpath; an omnipresent film that coated everything, leaving no nook or cranny cursed with the burden of cleanliness.
It’s debatable where this dust had come from: the mill, the distant bauxite mine, the simple passage of time? I’m sure that I once read history lies within dust and, well, if that’s the case, a Polis such as this may have had a bit too much history.

I had always lived here, the rhythm of the Polis’s cycles stuttered and flowed through my veins much in the way a middle class diet of bread and dripping seems to merrily inflict upon a heart.
I woke, ran my pot-plant under the tap, looked mournfully at the kettle, and then set out for a better option.

Stairs,
            lobby,
                        coffee cart.

The barista who himself perched upon the verge 5th and collins was a stout-ish fellow of blunt simplicity; his cart, heavily laden by newspaper and unidentifiable meats, seemed almost to be an extension of himself: matching the gruff fifty something who chose to keep his clothes unwashed as much as he left his sentences untarnished by stray adjective.
‘Morning,’ he would intone with the brightness of an iron pot, never ‘good morning.’ or ‘it’s a bugger of a morning isn’t it?’
He seemed to almost treat these interactions as if they were an obligation of time; ‘It is morning’ I’m sure he meant, ‘you are in the time that we call morning, respect it as such.’ He must have known me by now–three years I had been a customer–but as I approached the cart and his two dead eyes regarded me as a stranger, I knew once again that he would ask for my name, make himself a short black and ask what my name was again.

I walk to the park.
Most days I seem to find myself here through both habit and circumstance.
A tidy patch of open garden that holds the furthest of cries from the uncurated bushland that was here long ago. Was there bush here once before? It sometimes felt as if the Polis had always just been, that we were only hermits who had found this city and taken it as a home. This grassland may have never been wilderness, it’s entire existence concrete until a public servant convinced enough people that the polis was too grey and ‘A bit of a park would be nice.’
It was nice, a wide stretch of dusty grass flanked by figs and rubina, and oft placed benches holding that tacky film upon them that would always make tourists regret wearing black pants.

The park was filled with the regular denizens of morning.
Misty eyed suits wandering in the vague direction of an office, retail workers, still shellshocked from the horrors of the weekend.
I once saw an old man, kind of face and grey of hair, pluck a pigeon up from the ground and casually underarm the idiot bird directly into a bin.
Devoid of expression the bloke just walked away almost as if he had disposed of some stray litter, his civic duty was done and he needed no thanks: the meak fluttered banging behind him seemed to be only distant applause.
This pigeon, fat from the opulence of food scraps available to it, didn’t choose to struggle as it was unceremoniously dumped into the bin, as if its propensity of existence was simply living in the moment and not grounded by comparative fortune.
I struggled with this for some time, was the man shortsighted? Did it appear as a fuzzy shape that could have been a newspaper just rolled up and left on the pathway? Should I take a lesson from this bird’s good humor? Am I thinking too much again?
Probably…
A perfectly normal uncommon occurrence that so often appears to happen in the park.

Finishing my coffee I glanced at the newspaper I had bought. Noticing the antiquated date I was left to furrow my brow and relent to the crossword, hoping that it was not pre-filled by forigen hand as it had sometimes been before.
The wind, now over is morning tantrum, had settled into a forlorn kind of listlessness that was the living envy of the mopy university students who sat near the park fountain and ruminated over the psychology of nothing and everything.

Peaceful, if you could call it that. Morning in the Polis was quite a few things, but today it felt peaceful.

One across: A bean, drinkable but horrid in soup. Yes I’m talking to you Shopie!
Six letters

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J.McCray
2020