Layover by Charles Bukowski
Making love in the sun, in the morning sun in a hotel room above the alley where poor men poke for bottles; making love in the sun making love by a carpet redder than our blood, making love while the boys sell headlines and Cadillacs, making love by a photograph of Paris and an open pack of Chesterfields, making love while other men- poor folks- work. That moment- to this. . . may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind- there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.
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