He was living in one of those beautiful
Virginia college towns,
but he had spent the last thirty years
hanging on for dear life in New York city.

His face was never clean.
His eyes could never relax.

Truth used to be stranger than fiction,
he said,
but too many believed in that now.

It didn’t mean what it used to.
It had gone the way of a joke on a t-shirt.

I guess he knows what’s he’s talking about.
Thirty years living in and around
those New York Subways back when they looked like
a cross between The French Connection and The Warriors.

Furiously quick, painfully slow old trains
trying to feed the tracks cigarettes and newspapers.

An underground library of graffiti and delusion.
No two stories were ever exactly alike,
and no one story ever had a traditional
beginning, middle or end.

He told me it was a hell of a lot more interesting
than the museums or the stand-up comedy clubs.
He said to me that he had to get out of the city
because they just didn’t want his kind around anymore.

They pushed him and a whole lot more out to make room
to apply as much hospital room sensibility as possible
to the history of the downtown along all those brilliant streets.

He said he was happy to go,
that it wasn’t the city he grew up in anymore.

I see him wandering around the college a lot,
pretending to be drunk and always getting in trouble
for trying to steal books from the library.

When there’s time,
and there’s never quite enough of that,
I take him out for coffee and midday campfire stories.

He rants.
He waves his hands around like John Carradine.
He gets quiet right when I’m really interested.

Probably a real mess as a young man,
I think he’s just waiting for a cold snap in August
to finish him off.

Right?
That’s how it usually works with people
who were unlucky enough to figure out the wrong things,
isn’t it?

Personally,
if I really had to guess,
I think he just misses all his friends.

They’re long gone, you know.
Even more than he tends to be.

06/12/2009

Author's Note: No, I'm not coming back after what I must admit was a reasonably mysterious departure and deletion of the work I've published here. I've given some of the reasons for leaving in a Facebook post, so I'm not going to do a whole thing about it again here on Pathetic. I'm running this piece to...I don't know...keep my options open. I'm not planning to stop in regularly, and I won't be running all of my poetry here. The idea is to have this here to avoid being deleted and to leave the door open to come back if I want to. At the moment, I don't see that happening, but I'd still like to keep it open. I won't be in very often, but I'll try to drop in from time to time.

Posted on 06/12/2009
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