Headline

We cannot know what’s going on
inside another’s head, today the papers
said he stood there looking
like a man who stared
his own death down, but knew
he could not win. Perhaps,
but maybe it was something
so much smaller in his stare, a pastry
just behind the glass, a thing he wanted
as a boy, he stood there wishing
switching one foot to the other, hoping
while his mother fished
for pennies in her coin purse
buying bread and gossip from the lady
at a bakery that closed years ago
in his hometown.