The Capitola Token: A Bag of Flour for a Ticket to the Pictures

Lyrics

Little brass circle.
Warm in my palm.
Worn smooth by a hundred years of waiting.
What are you?
A little secret.
A small, strange sun.

You fell from a sack of Capitola Flour.
Dusty and white, a promise on a kitchen counter in 1927.
A Tuesday afternoon.
The Atlanta Milling Company's finest.
For bread, for biscuits, for the family.
But you... you were something else entirely.
Hidden inside the necessary thing.

One Capitola Flour Token.
For your favorite theatre.
A bag of flour for a ticket to the pictures.
Exchange on admission.
From the kitchen to the matinee.
From the heat of the oven to the cool, velvet dark.

I see her tucking you into her purse.
The clink of you against a streetcar fare.
The decision made between mending and a movie.
Today, the mending can wait.
The sun on John Wesley Dobbs Avenue is bright.
But she's heading for the electric dark.
For the faces on the silver screen.

One Capitola Flour Token.
For your favorite theatre.
A bag of flour for a ticket to the pictures.
Exchange on admission.
From the kitchen to the matinee.
From the heat of the oven to the cool, velvet dark.

And then the moment.
The ticket booth window.
The hand, still smelling faintly of dough, passing you over.
You fall into the till.
Your work is done.
And the lights inside begin to dim.
The world of baking is gone.
The world of dreaming is here.

Little brass circle.
Warm in my palm.
Your journey ended there, in that wooden drawer.
But I'm holding you now.
Atlanta Milling Co.
A ticket to a Tuesday that's long since gone.
A little ghost of a movie.