Suppose its mid afternoon and we go to a cafe. Suppose we sit across from each other at a table out front. Suppose we both sit cross legged so that our dangling feet are almost touching each other. Suppose that on this bright and bold shadowed spring day our feet, dangling still, brush each other in an infrequent but never quite accidental way. Suppose we've been married, you and I, for decades and we still have places to go and things to say.

And suppose we're leaving the cafe now, arm in arm, in middle life, halfway to death and still fully alive, chatting easily. Suppose all this and wonder finally, what if it all means something?

Because the easy truth of it ain't hard to come by: Life is random to the core, all existence is a futile march to empty space and we're all just physical beings on a physical plane. The joy in your senses is a fluke to ignore.

But now suppose in our vacancy
A cafe table alone
stands waiting for new occupants
A blank line in a poem.

And suppose the lone warm body that fills one half of those two seats is angry, empty and all alone. The happiness we know to the woman now seated is nothing but a misappropriation of luck. The table that's empty by half might as well be fuel for fire because it's burning in her mind, burning to the ground at her feet where she's a giant, a freak of consumption and but a devil in cute shoes.

Do our arms reminded locked? Do we stroll through the park? Is the luck all around us a sunbeam to neglect? Are we thinking about dinner, where the chef is a god and the idols we know forget us and our charms?

Because the cafe is closed now so the seats are all empty. They are empty of their fortune and they are empty of their loneliness. And the hard truth we deserve is ours no matter where we sit, it's a vacancy of time, where everything is frozen and all our lives are one life, soulfully.