The Night

“I can take them any way I please. On a crosswalk, in a bathtub, off a church pew. With a sudden fall, a chunk of food in the windpipe, a violent fever. In a sudden sharp breath, in prolonged agony, in their sleep. Up to me. I’ve never known why. I slip out of one night and into the next, nights like this, an unending blur of them, like white lines in headlights. I stopped counting the decades decades ago. Today is always a tomorrow or a yesterday and I never know which it will be, and I don’t care anymore.

“I never see their eyes. I sit where I sit and I watch. I watch them and I consider. I form opinions and judgments, as if I were in robes, on a bench, but I feel more like the fellow who runs the newsstand. Destiny? Two bits.

“Then I pick one. Doesn’t matter who. Or why. I have to pick one. Can’t move on until it’s done. Sometimes there’s a crowd, sometimes there’s just a couple of old women on a park bench next to me. I choose. Just one.”