saturday morning
gets into work late and sees
students lining up

coffee chai coffee?
morning decisions come fast:
empty coffee pot.

is it after noon?
let's cancel class and go skate
like blue angels fly.

A man at the bar gave me the shirt off of his back on Thursday night.

Actually, he was not just any man at the bar, but Matthew the bar's cook. It was his cooking shirt and he'd been wearing it for multiple days. The front was damp from washing dishes and it was ripe with hot kitchen smells and the two-day body odour of a fry-cook in an english-theme "pub". I put on fry-cook sweat and kitchen grease and damp front and I wore it to express my gratitude for shirt freely given. For shirt and frycook and english theme pub. For english theme pub cooks who give their shirts to pushy girls on thursday nights. I put it on and wore it out.

Yet: how intimate to wear a total stranger's smells! Smells, unlike an overly forward drunk, can not be told to take a step back and re-evalutate their use of personal space. They cannot be ground to a mash verbally and sent slinking away.

I woke the next morning with faint whiff of a strange man's odours on my body. I put on non-bar clothing but still I turned my head and inhale, and there are foreign bodies. His smells didn't leave me alone until I had aggressively showered and washed away with acrid socially acceptable soap-smell. But I swear! This is not a nose-up-turning disturbance of smells. Not a "use deodorant" or a "I work in an air-conditioned office", but rather a violation of self. Of my own personal smell flavor boquet. It was as if the man himself had enveloped me with arms and skin and lips. I might have taken him to bed and woken up with the smells of mingled sex, shiny trails of dried fluids and smell smell smell.

The man gave me the shirt off his back. He extracted no price but an embrace of odour. What shirt? Imagine this: A proudly billowing american flag, surrounded by playing kittens. It's patriotism and gratutious kitten usage all in one!

To matthew who gave me his shirt: thank you. I did not mean to know you so well.