The man smokes beside me, inside of a smoking prohibited shelter.

The smell wafts further in because he is by the open frame.

The smoke bites my throat, a threat with every breath.

Time passes with equal opportunity for survival or for death.

I don’t like it  because it has a smell.

I don’t like it because of the cancer.

Children run just outside screaming and laughing that sirens go by without stopping.

The street in the summer has people on it burning from the sun.

But people hold dollar ice creams, sucking on them like ice cubes of sugar.

Boys wearing the gang colors of a faded Miami, in tank tops that hang on their biceps

Fill the street as dusk drops on the street and the rooftops.

I remember chewing gum and sunglasses, both I use to keep me thin.

The beautiful are models, filled with certainty about the world where they occupy life as if it were space.

In summer it is too hot, so that the rain that falls is warm.

In winter I can’t feel anything but bound up.

There is no place I can be except in between, a place that I just fall into.

Elysium is absolutely perfect because it started existence as a hope and is created out of a wish.

It is a bet whether we choose to go there, or forever miss our chance when we rely on others to take us there.

It is a secret everyone knows but can’t prove is true.

The man smokes beside me, inside of a smoking prohibited shelter.

He bangs his cane loudly on the metal legs of the chair.

And I get up and push past him to escape the crowded smallness of a room with glass walls.

Perfection is always believed to exist despite the marred definition of the Greeks and the Romans.

I brush, lightly, slightly, the frame, only feeling its hardness and its immovable force, regretting my bruise.

I do not inhabit a lake of canoes and mountains.

There is nothing there.

The trees don’t talk, the water is senseless, and I have no where to drop cigarettes and ashes.

The beauty of the beach is beautiful at night, the waves rushing loud.

It is cold enough on the sand to bury the dead there, their bones becoming shells.