opinion among judges

seth the bookseller sits on the ledge of his downtown window smoking a cigarette. his shop is gutted. torn apart by boulder's general disinterest in the (somewhere thriving) subculture buzzing about antique collectable children's books. cardboard boxes disrupt the once certain walkways while he sits outside there, watching the other side of the street as he has for three years. his record is playing inside and he thinks about fantasy football. the league with the other pearl street booksellers on the block between 17th and 19th. how it made everything more bearable and how he will be empty without everything that he could not bear. he thinks about the era of mariocart and video baseball, about patti smith and the $130 book, and he tries not to think about what he will do next.

I have a photograph that hangs at the head of my bed. it is of a field. sandy grey soil cut with rows of crops. unidentifiable plant shoots resembling grass or miniature yuccas sit inches above the ground. their length spreads out towards the end of my bed as if perspective lines were objects that could be plucked from the photo and draped as a sheet. i imagine, sometimes, that i am lying down in that field. that i am born of that dirt. laid carefully in lines just inches above the ground. it calms me. i imagine this now. my window is open. and though this means spiders will crawl over my unaware sleeping body, perhaps biting at any resistance i might give, their eight foreign eyes and tiny thighs acting under instinct and nothing else -- an artifact of this consensus world -- at least right now, i can hear the rain.