destiny, density, the pope and an ice cube

Hand in hand we walked into the cool evening,
the pope and I.
He was unsteady.
Old.

Slurring his words a bit, which disturbed me
like a maid at a cheap motel who doesn't notice the sign on my door.
I felt a bit peculiar in jeans and a t-shirt
with this painfully crumpled little man in formal robes.

We stopped for a moment, and pondered destiny
and the density of the population
of the silly city within the city on the Tiber.

I held the door for him when we arrived at Vincenzo's Pizzeria
he mumbled.

"Scuzi?" the brown-haired midget of a man with a seedy moustache and
brass-rimmed
glasses.

"He wants a large coke with ice and a small italian, everything, oil,
no mayo, extra provalone," I
translated the latin grunts for his holiness.

He smiled at me, and I asked about the Redsox. He laughed.
I grabbed the sandwich, and offered all the depths of my profundity,
"Sometimes, God sucks."

He laughed again.
Then, clear and strong in perfect English, "He does what he will."

Hand in hand, we walked into the cool evening,
and John Paul crunched ice from his coke.