A Walk Through a Small Park

My lady friend and I sit on stumps. When she sings she rings the woods with a monarch's butterfly wings. A crowd of bikers on foot as hikers in thick with woods unsaddles moods. Old ladies end up mothering their men with woodsy mugs. Men spot us and stop smothering their ladies with bear hugs. Sweat rolls off of one of them; he's guzzling down a beer. As if a resin-thick secretion from a pine tree mints us as the smell of fear, we toe the line, my lady friend and I; we're of two urbanites, our odysseys, modest, gesture-frozen, trembling bodies. My lady friend and I, a collective bower, we shade the pedestrian biker crowd with whom we ingress by sharing laughter. Sweat steams off of another beer-guzzling hiker. Metallic echoes from emptied cans kicked, some hikers' alcoholic burps balloon along the narrow nature's trail. The stench rubs pine the wrong way. Branches burst the laughs inclined to float over nonverbal head shaking. We pinch our nostrils, dodge smells from beer cans strewn about. Breadcrumbs help my lady friend and I find a pigeon-holed sunset sprawled across the skyline. Head-bobbing caught up in waves of crowds approaching the park, we make way for encroachments in the dark.