The Porch-Sitter.

Each morning and each evening when I look out of my window there is man in sports shorts and a team t-shirt sitting and reading a book or magazine and smoking a cigarette on his hovel-type porch which is really a concrete slab under the eave of his stone-notched house across the street in my neighborhood.

He is sitting alone and sometimes he does not look at the paper in front of him but rather out into the nothingness in the distances that is really the roof-tops of a number of houses that belong to the streets on either side of his strange T-crossing street that is an after-thought and really doesn't belong.

I wonder if he is reading before or after work or school or if he sleeps all day long and only reads - if the book is his only companion and he sits holed up in a dark room with the curtains drawn and a pack of cigarettes to accompany his journey and he stares up at the black ceiling on his brown bed-cover and dreams of being someone somewhere else and having a success that never amounted to anything in this dimension.

And I place him as a writer with a romantic past that ended somewhere on 2nd Street in Philadelphia with a woman in a mid-length red dress with a black leather belt slinging her coffee-mug across the table and storming out on him into the snow or the pouring down rain and wrapping a brown non-descript jacket around her shoulders and throwing swear-words over her shoulder at his placid face as he sat at the table unmoving with a manuscript before him instead of a plate.

He stamps out the cigarette with a flip-flop entangled foot and comes up for air, staring around him like an old dog tied out in the same yard year after year and he drops his newspaper (this time) to the ground in front of the tattered lawn chair that he drags out daily and he skids the chair back inside the door and lets it shut behind him and the newspaper sits sullenly and flutters in the tepid wind.