"It's a tremendous act of faith to even get up in the morning."
-Cornel West
The simplest things can become terrific feats.
I remember, on a chilly afternoon last January,
a woman dropped by to quarrel.
She had weathered this storm before,
her brother lost his teeth to the police,
and we had no rapport to speak of.
My demeanor must have been incorrigible,
because her whole face twitched,
and suddenly her points collapsed in an awful shriek:
“My only strategy is to find a reason to wake up
every morning and keep from slitting my wrists.”
We hardly knew each other,
any one present in that drafty room,
so all looked on, mutely.
My tired arms
were possessed by the longing
to clasp her about me like
my tattered childhood blanket,
(a tiny prayer to ward off monsters under the bed)
investigations be damned, along with the vexing intrigues
that accompany blood feuds:
“Isn't he an anarchist?” “Isn't she a punk?”—
(anarchists, nothing but middle class honkees,
and punks, drunk scenesters, y'know)—
such were the lines we drew,
and cartoons we became.
The gravity of the situation
forced us apart
and we never talked again.
Still, I like to think our torsos,
strangely close, would have orbited
our estrangement,
and taken momentary refuge
in the delicate embrace.
Vanity, I know,
but such fictions, withdrawn
to the hinterlands of possibility,
may be enough, perhaps everything.
At a show the other night,
the kind of venue she might have graced
with her rusty bicycle and black stockings,
I saw a man,
a kindly, wrinkled face,
arms extended, his calloused fingers
offering cigarettes to no one in particular.
No one noticed him talking to himself
in the shadows, and the gift receded, as
the steady hum of street lights.
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