scrabble after hours, myriads in the hawthorn

the clouds look just like clouds today, no dragons, no rabbits or castles today. the coffee shop today is but a castle, liquid gold overflowing our cups, sugar and spice to warm the heart and the mouth. the sailors and the callgirls gather to muse over their dealings, salty brine stiffening their hair into peaks, mermaids of old. merchants and musicians gather here, the people we fall in love with in an instant are here. the travellers are enfolded, the poor, too, the artists flock to fawn over one another, and nostalgia anoints the walls. 

the coffee house after hours is black and still, the humming of human traffic no longer present, the drumbeats and hiss of steamwands like serpents stilled for another quiet night. all is softly imprinted though, a silk scarf here, impressions of a hemline left against a sideboard, letters of books captured in the mellifluous atmosphere. the lamps, now extinguished, left their imprints on the summer-scented indigo sky outside, like lightbulbs hanging from the trees: viridian incandescent.

sweet slumber drifts from between the paving stones, meandering the streets of the mind, gently fading away the day.

cecily