Haiku

Something stinks in here
Man: turns off the space heater
Listens carefully

Who smells so good?

His stop was coming he put away his H.P. Lovecraft story collection – he had just finished The Horror at Red Hook – stood up and let his momentum do the walking for him as the train slowed and wow who smells so good? The pretty girl with an expression suggesting pain? The tall, husky, bearded lad with his long, black hair up in a bun? Can’t be me, he thought, my cologne is spicier and more amber. This is turquoise and iris and cumulus clouds.

Not the dogfaced screamers, nor the eldritch, seething, apelike, Asian devilworshipping Kurds (I left a few things out – swarthy, dark, what else?) Lovecraft was getting so worked up about in The Horror at Red Hook.

Avoiding dogfaced screamers, the man followed a five-year-old girl with sneakers with blinking soles, her big sister holding her hand, down the stairs and to the streetcar stop.

What is your pet peeve? Lovecraft was a xenophobe. This man here, he tried not to think about charity. Everytime he reads about a company running a charity event for one of their employees in dire financial straits because something fell on them or plowed into them or bit them, he has to think, why didn’t the company provide their employees with decent health insurance instead?

Every time he reads a heartwarming (seriously) story about thousands of people running or marching for a cause, he has to wonder why they aren’t marching on a capitol building or a country club instead. With torches and pitchforks.

He gave a panhandler twice as much as she was asking for yesterday, it’s not that he’s opposed to generosity.

When some billionaire donates money to a cause, he has to think, they should pay taxes, instead. Financing causes is plutocracy. Paying taxes is democracy.

He begins to walk up the hill to work, reading his book as he goes. He takes a big, Ministry-of-Funny-Walks step to avoid something that is either a dog turd that looks like a partially-eaten chocolate pretzel, or a partially-eaten chocolate pretzel. A mean-faced woman with dark red — almost black — lipstick walks three little kids the opposite way past him and gives him a scowl. A little blonde girl passes perpendicularly on her way to school.  A gang of little boys laugh about something in a good-natured way.

It is windy and the sun is out.