She plunges the stamp carefully
into the tiny square
of a tattered, beige coffee card.
“After six,” she says indifferently,
“you get the next one free.”
“But I never come in here
after 6:00,” he protests.
She looks up slowly
her eyes as flat as a full moon
and tired. I know she’s thinking
I gotta get a better job.
But I also know how trapped she is
in this one.
In the end we’re all trapped
in something.
So I write it down
first one word, then the next.
Pulling the minute together
from disconnected fragments
of moments, trying to
coagulate it
into some form of history.
Hoping in the end
it will all come to something
meaningful
yet trapped in the idea
that it probably
won’t.
the lazy photographer 