Petals fell and floated in the periphery of his awareness
Punctuated only by the suns patterned sabbatical from the adulation of the city streets and it's blissful nomads.
Gradually it would return in season
An undercurrent of mechanical drone resurrected the daydreamer from his quiescent musings
From his sidewalk monastery he observed the passing urban crawl like one who keeps vigil over the dead
With the stoicism of a fisherman the lolling stream carried the bustle beyond even his cast net of sardonic speculation
His line of consciousness being temporarily tugged by a branch's ballet in the sunlight, hieroglyphics hidden in a line of brick, or the sparrows who sang deep but happy secrets
Theirs were acts of beauty hidden only by the world's unwillingness to see them
He was content like this
To be irretrievably lost within the labyrinth of his own thoughts
He felt he was a hermit
The keeper of a long forgotten secret
A mime who's silent art was solitude
It was almost comical wasn't it?
The figure a cold stone gargoyle atop his palisade
Scowling at the street below
At flower petal Charybdis and screeching Scylla
His odyssey internal and unknown to passers-by
Save for what could be conveyed by the cigarettes' soliloquy
The clown allowed himself to be swept away by philosophical inquisition and poetic sophistry
What persisted was the wish that it was quieter
That for an afternoon he could be spared the automobiles
He took another drag and tried to find solace
One of the metal demiurges parked portside of his wrought iron Quebec, and he noted the petals caught in the grooves of the wheel
Some held on amidst the ambulation
Others fell the fall of mortally wounded heroes and where caressed by the whispering air
He speculated that perhaps truth and love and beauty could be like these
They were supple beings of nature, or monoliths who inspired awe with their mystery
The modern world would keep them like relics of a former time
It would permit them to exist so long as they did not impede progress
They were relegated to the status of a ****** or an indentured servant
Even their necessary and incumbent pulchritude seemed sapped from them
Like a diadem above a trash heap
A gold ring in a pigs snout
They could for a brief moment decorate the vehicles, the sidewalks, dryad like in his own mop of hair
They may even be carried along by them
Until duty to the god of utility would shirk them off
They could not be allowed to stop the hymn to immolation which emanated from the streets
Lest they give respite to the crusade of endless noise
These foreign gods denied their creation the temptation to joy and inward reflection
The punishment for this was metropolitan purgatory
The two drachmae owed the ferryman were harmony and patience
So it goes
What goodness could come from all this hum drum
What great acts of love, beauty, or courage could brunch inspire in these terrestrial wanderers
It was hard to imagine Gilgamesh as a bartender, even harder to posit Jesus as a CEO
It was time to go
His own impending appointment resuscitated him from his afternoon of little death
He left the cafe and walked blissfully fettered unto new distractions