The One at the Swimming Pool

the sun came up today – out today.
it is beautiful and brightblinding.
it is sweater warm and then pan hot.

i buy two packs of cigarettes
and walk home from the corner store.

on the way, in the complex of apartments that i live in,
i pass the pool.
it is shallow,
and the tiles laid around it direct you not to dive.

when i first moved here,
the pool was a deeply sick, cloudy green.

today, the sun’s light refracts off the contours
of its crystal rippling ugly-smooth surface.

my toes peek out of the holes of my old shoes
at the lower frame of my vision.
one of them is bleeding.

as i stare into the patterns that appear,
and play with each other,
across a halfway dense collection of H2O molecules
(gathered here for the entertainment of a small
population of lower-middle-class to poverty line
living human beings)
i begin to think and feel tired.

i crash my body onto a white plastic chaise lounge,
a number of which are arranged around the pool.

the surface under my ass,
made up of many parallel crossbars,
is broken wholely down the center.

as i fall through the flexing pinchers it creates
i catch and raise myself back up.

upon lifting and replacing myself gently,
i am light enough
(after the initial impact of the sleepy, sunny dropping
of my body)
to rest on the unsupported dry white plastic,
and so i rest here.

the sun warms and then burns the dry white plastic bones
beneath my thin flesh.
my eyes droop in the hot morning light.

it has been raining for a week.
it has been stuffed grey for over a week.
but the sun is out this morning.