lunch hour

the maidens who work in the miasma of moloch's malaria move their feet slowly and their pocketbooks calmly in the pure blue afternoon of atlantis the flower seller has survived but the man who sold newspapers (printed on paper) is history and the shoe shine man has been written out of the history which has itself been burned in the blast furnace of buck rogers's blueberry pies i would like to ask the flower seller the secret of her enduring fame but the curtain of caution falls over me like catwoman's caressing camellias as don fernando tunes his piano for his final performance outside the newly opened panera's someday - very soon savants will remember panera, and ruby tuesdays, and dunkin donuts as the flashing emblems and impregnable strongholds of a lost empire and nothing , not even the smiles of aging maidens opening their pocketbooks to buy flowers in the blue afternoon of betelgeuse from the last flower vendor in the expanding universe is so sad as a lost empire