It’s noon when they throw him out of the car
and send him right down the concrete stairs
of the best place for miles to pretend it’s always
three a.m. on a blisteringly hot Saturday night.

He used to be into shoplifting
from the family business and telling girls he’ll get married
when the music business gets better,
he goes straight down those stairs and manages to do
a pretty spectacular job of cracking his head wide open.

But not before he tries to say goodbye and thanks
to everyone who is but really isn’t still in the car. No one but the driver can hear him anyway.
It can be heard to get your voice out over hundreds of condemned
comedians and the refugees of too many road maps and too many road movies.

Who knows how that kind of thing gets started? Who can say why hundreds
of these kids disappear before they can turn forty
and finally get respectable jobs.

Maybe they joined that last weird circus from the old days
and then traded off their valuables to the devil in exchange
for a chance to walk the wire above millions of street lights.

It happens. It happened to this guy.
He was drinking beer and racing shopping carts
in the middle of Food Lion when he got the call to pick up
his blindfold from the flower girl on Skin Street
and wait for further instructions.

Nobody saw him again for twenty years. Although his long-suffering
wife spent much of that time checking his Twitter account
for one-sentence poems detailing
heroic deeds in somewhere like Los Angeles
or Hannibal, Missouri.

He probably didn’t care if people missed him,
and he probably didn’t have the time to tell them so.

Splitting his head open didn’t seem to slow him down a bit.

He just picked himself up,
laughing and writing down jokes with nothing
but sudden gusts of threatening winds.

From there he just started wandering down the street,
assaulting anyone who might have been a loved one
and chattering so excitedly that you couldn’t understand
a word of it.

His story is probably as interesting
as anything that has no place actually happening,
if only just the strange parts that usually take up the middle.

Good luck getting him to calm down long enough
to talk about it. That can take decades and patience greater
than anything possessed by saints who are too heavy to march.

Good luck and try to be at work on time.

09/11/2010

Posted on 09/11/2010
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard