Smoking Gun

Here's a poem with a slightly nostalgic, mystical café atmosphere: **5 Calendar Café** On the corner of Fifth and Yesterday sits the 5 Calendar Café, where five clocks hang on the wall and none agree. One keeps spring alive forever, green leaves trembling in porcelain cups. One is stuck in October, smelling of rain and old books. One ticks backward through lost summers, returning names to forgotten faces. One refuses movement entirely, holding a single golden afternoon like a secret. And one— the oldest— measures time not by hours but by hearts. The patrons arrive from different years. A young woman waits for a letter already burned decades ago. An old man stirs coffee beside the child he once was. Two lovers miss each other by twenty-seven years and wave through the window glass. The waitress knows everyone's order before they remember it themselves. Outside, the world rushes forward with its schedules and alarms, its deadlines and departures. Inside, time dissolves like sugar. The tea grows cold. The moon rises twice. A song from tomorrow plays softly on the radio. And when closing comes, the owner sweeps up fragments of unfinished days, folds the calendars carefully, and locks the door. But only until morning. Because somewhere between memory and possibility, between what was and what might yet be, the 5 Calendar Café is always open.