Moving Statues

Instead of handing out little Dixie cups of Gatorade
and bananas to runners from the sidelines,
I hold out vials of crack & chocolate dipped
deep fried tacos.

I see one runner approach me, I call out to him,
'Would you like to end the pain? Here, slow down
you uptight douche.' Holding out a joint, 'Come here
take a hit and set your ass down.'

Suddenly he stops running, walks over to me, lifts
the yellow tape and sits down next to me on the curb.
He takes the white stick from my hand and immediately
sucks down one of the biggest hits I've ever seen.

Sitting indian style, with legs slightly raised,
his muscles go limp and he drops his head down
between his knees. Then, without looking, he lifts
his right hand with the joint back up into the air.

Retrieving it, I lay into it myself, thoroughly,
holding it in the upper third of my lungs,
then I let it out and lean my head back against the wall, looking up at the sky.

The other runners keep plodding along ahead of both of us. What are these people so scared of? What are they trying to escape? Jealous boyfriend, a shit job, a creepy Frankenstein? None of them can sit still, all of them

moving even as the world moves, nothing is stationary, life is always in motion, you stop you die, or at least approximate it, but here in this race there should be a dozen hunters with shotguns

also running thirty minutes behind them, chasing them, open season, on the runners. At least that would make more sense and would define what these people
are running from... or for.

Their lives. Their lives always thirty minutes ahead of
or behind schedule, never on time. The guy next to me holds his hand back up. I don't even know who he is. I hand him the doobage.

He runs it deftly back into his mouth between two pinched fingers and he totally looks like a pro the way he puts a drag on it, like something out of the movies
it feels practiced, rehearsed,

a bit dramatic, you know when some intellectual moron tries to feign off their insignificance by pretending to act persecuted, distressed, tired by the world, like the kids in Europe, tousled hair,

perfectly shaved 5 o'clock shadows, hanging out in front of coffee shops, life, so hard carried by the state... or their mothers but you'd never know the way they pretend to be Romanian concentration camp survivors,

honing that designer tragic look to an art in their world of unemployed freeloading. Not these runners. They are like Protestant missionaries made of pentium processors and hard drives. They never stop.

This was the only one, this young shithole sitting next to me. 'You never had it in you, did you?' I ask. He just sits quietly looking out across the Pacific Ocean

the clouds starting to reach down like witch hands imposing rain, the way they curl out, and my new friend like an elderly domestic cat too tired to take shelter,
waiting for its next morsel of store bought food.