Among Texas Capital Lawn

As morning breeze lifts, heavy from the night before, leaving dew upon vacant fields, our sun warms my face and beams brightly through. Quiet Sundays leave me solitary among the urban wilderness; a wasteland of concrete and decrepit men laying half-dead in empty parking lots, lying on benches. Streets are overrun yet, vacant, desolate in its own sprawl.
Among the Texas capital lawn, brown and dead, foreign families speaking foreign languages. They all walk and laugh while Bowen and I play merrily near by.
“Do you like Texas?” I ask.
“Yeah I guess,” she was a beautiful twenty-year-old then, perfect, and we are young.
“How bout’ you?”
“I do enough.”
We lay in the bright mid-day sun partially shadowed by the building, standing tall and wide. Spectators stand in presence of its grand stature. Flags, Texas at full mast next to US, ping and flap in the wind; they proclaim something but I don’t know what. Some form of pride flailing about in the morning air yelling incoherently. Our eyes stare, not quite in reverence but in aw of the spectacle orchestrated perfectly for all to admire. Unimpressed, we make our way to the museum of modern art. A hipster in a blue blazer passes us with a smug stare, hidden through his yellow-framed sunglasses but noticeably there. He slightly grazes my arm and turns his shoulders without moving his carefully crafted head to avoid disturbing the girlish dirty blond hair piled unsteadily on one side.
“Watch it!” He yells walking steadily. I turn, pondering his gesture without a reply, then look at my beautiful Bowen, who is smiling wide, we continue.
The tall building stands a block or so down from our capital, reflecting massive sky line with it's dark, tented-glass-exterior. We pay our four dollars to flamboyant front desk worker and enter the gallery. As I see a mass of people staring at the main piece in front entrance, some six-foot by four-foot poster and wooden printing board, from some 40’s or 50’s screen-printing collection, I realize the complete waste of time this will be.
“What do you think?” I ask walking past Bowen
“I’m bored.” She said after a long pause at a very plain work on the wall behind me.
I love this woman.
She then walks through the gallery and enters the children’s area. With four dollars spent for four minutes of shit, we waste away an hour in a brightly colored room with miniature chairs playing with stamps and type writers, to write and record. Eyes of annoyed parents enter scanning and non-verbally telling us to leave.
I finish pounding out my poem and she draws a picture. We exchange and smile in acceptance of one another’s work.
Once we finally left the museum the sun had risen much higher and our city began to crawl like I knew she could. Bums litter the streets, all belongings, scattered at their feet, dressed in rags and dirt crusted deep inside their wrinkled faces. Tired, dazed and oblivious, they scan side-walks and streets with curious eyes. Tall steeples of down-town-church are far off, gaudy and white, adjacent to the bank and grocery. These weathered men hover within a few blocks of their sanctuary which gives a free lunch on Sunday afternoons.
“Where you headed sir?” I turn and an older black man with a salted beard is looking over his shoulder at me. Bowen is several steps ahead, skipping, letting her long silky black hair flail and glisten in the sun.
“Maybe to the springs, how about you?”
“Does it look like I’m going any where?”
“Dunno, are you?”
We could continue this for hours.