The Man at the Bus Stop

You drive by, for three seconds you see the man at the bus stop. An old brown coat and a tired look is all you know of him. Yet the light is green and your car is pulled into the stream of a task-filled day, to a destination that brings him out of sight and out of mind.

Behind you and without your thoughts he waits for the bus to carry him along to his routine venture. Behind his weary eyes are fading childhood dreams, before his feet the cold pavement of realism.

The bus ushers in the smell of exhaust and the shadows of the city. Under the windows, the polished masks of news-reporters and movie stars stare blankly into forgotten space. The bus is always looking forward, a cold joint opens the door with a hiss.

The old bench that has seen a thousand faces is fastened to the ground at the intersection of souls. Wheels upon wheels flood by through the dry cracks of urban marrow. Faces forward fixed on the ends of strings that pull them through tense-muscle traffic to the refuge of busyness.

The old bench with wooden panels forged in rows by rain and wind. Rotted cracks made smooth by time, suspended between iron legs. Two pieces mirrored with an arm-rest, one foot forward, one foot back each. Bolted into the pavement where lonely glades strain blindly through into an unknown world.

Neither iron nor steel can bear the weight. Between the bus and the bench sits a king, even a god. A heart pumping red life into a being that can breathe in the skies, warming hands that can touch the moon and sift its dust. Eyes that can see what is behind the autumn sun and ears that can know the song of ages.

Between the bus in the bench is an ordinary man, sitting beneath the skies and stars of a thousand ages that will burn away. The bus will sigh in a metal heap melted for further failures. The bench will break, the sleepless cities scream for rest, as these wrinkled faces will touch the end of the cosmos as all comes to dust and flame, before the dreadful Name.