A thin protrusion in the cavernous brown aisle of bookshelves, he stands like some giant toothpick contorted to bend straight at the poetry section,
(Of course he's looking at poetry)
brown hair literally like an old, old brown mop hiding his sacred eyes from mine. There's a crevice between the back of his white V-neck and the ugly wood convergence of two shelves; I wash my vision over the towering geometry of aged poetry collections to my left and just past him, congested across the rows, congested like the aisle, wearing their enigmatic black rims and bold gold initials and names the same way this hipster wears his tattered jorts: I am legitimate. For a moment I feel some sick shock memory of sinus pressure, but like blowing my nose, I must take a baby bookstore step forward and poise to shuffle pelvis-to-ass past this weasel. And step, and step, and here I am at his side, and turn, and slide--
He rotates and blows a gust of his air onto me. I blink as we meet eyes, and I am blind in the Kingdom of Incense, I am churning in a wet haystack flushed with nag champa and marijuana and American Spirit smoke. Eyes snap open and I watch him take a lanky step to my left and once again bend his neck forward over that pallid V of exposed chest, browsing dopy-eyed and low-shouldered at the poetry.
Suddenly I'm alive again, like my pulse had ceased in his possession of scent.
Suddenly I'm awake again to the low shuffles and slithering voices that blow like the bookstore's breath, and to the dust and old paper smell. Now I am eye-to-eye with a stern, tight row of books. I take a glance back at the Hipster and seem to see him for his entire soul, which was just rolled into my nose in a gaseous form. He just turned the empty space behind him into a vagina and pushed me onto the Earth for the second time, and thinks nothing of it. And all I wanted was a quiet few minutes in the bookstore.
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