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BUY ANOTHER, LISTEN CLOSER … Snotted on the curb at most every corner, though Joe favored Fourth and Roses; Wiped his thumb along the outseam of his bleached near white as cotton jeans (would pass for some forgotten hippy so patched and sewn those jeans); Cursed passing lookers whose unbidden and unhidden facial-formed disgusts were powerless to change his ageless graying stubble. Impolite noses turned against his human stench. If you've time- if you have the courage, why not pause to listen to Joe mumble, give Joe wine or give him coffee strong and tight as bark upon a maple; slouch right down along beside him at the angle where the building shade and concrete on your ass feel soft and subtle; close your eyes and see his story, it repeats near every hour. Joe once had loved a woman, not the kind you see today but a woman perfect, sinless, untainted by a modern product, wore her skin as if it were her priceless jewels, cast no shadow where she passed him in the swelter of some city big and mighty whose towers pointed strong and upward from its captive lusts long buried in a subterranean world that he had not known existed. From a world brightly marbled whose stained glass or blackened windows like a thousand shameless mirrors reflected suited self as main agenda -- founder, maker, and the only winner -- found her first as just another unformed unnamed a stranger passing among the crowded beneath untipped city spires unseen from street or gutter in the city whose stainless steel erections reflected nothing nor no one but the fact that pretty walls do shining prisons make. He was there. That moment he turned outward, noticed something passing strange amid the crowd perhaps it was his breakfast or the ulcer that he nursed into perfection, perhaps it was a siren blaring or a random glare of sunlight off the windows or the tower of a building surrounding him in comfort as he walked a way he'd memorized then had long forgotten any other might have used it (he alone was all that mattered). What turned his inside outward was not some stranger like the others but a flash of true and plain and honest beauty he followed through the stainless city through its gutters up its stairways through the doorways glassed and bullet- proof into hid and snug seclusions that no one ever noticed, no one had ever mentioned, could be there in that city. Her back sat straight upon the barstool or her holy knees could bend so gently in a church or in a hallway of a building dark, unlit, in some unsavory unknown subcity filled with odors strong so human that he had never noticed in his perfect clean and spotless daily doings. A mighty new attraction that he never knew existed in the uncurved straight and narrow of flawless certain, sure, and happy being captive to the stainless moral city that he hadn't even noticed since birth among the straight lines of narrow walkways, all he thought he'd ever know. She was perfect, poised, but not exotic; seemed she was patterned by the thought- waves he had buried long ago, almost forgotten, long ago when he had welded his own chains into his cave wall, held himself the measure of the shadows that he cast on the rock-face of his prison nine-to-five and zero-zero-unto-twelvish. How he came to know her slowly is central to his story, slurred and slow, a tale of uprising from down among the common masses whose struggle for their paycheck now seemed a lowly selfish action in a city made of glass and iron by folk as simple as they'd been once so long before gray suits, white shirts had been invented; before the strangle-hold of needing became a single soulless love. All this he tells you, as if he's longing for some past he almost has forgotten. She was golden rays of sunlight; no, the sun and moon shared simple glow like dandruff on a collar or bloody speck on new-spread linen white as snow. Who say that absence of all color's black or white echoes all colors' perfect lack have never thought about the power so tight in the contrast of two colors. She is a dark we most fear at night around a corner of a nowhere that has suffered some strange blight; She is a light we squint against, a blemish as a snowfield or a desert from which we instinctively protect our sight. Say she's not a one to follow or that she does not truly live within us let us lie about the facts; or, leave the trail of a living human passing though the walls you've made your prison, tell of deeds and misdeeds proper and improper, snot upon all the corners of all corners in your sight (it's myrrh, an ancient ointment, that you leave to show your human presence; it's just a blessed that you bless with, to thank whatever gods or god you have forgotten, thanks for the fact that all's not straight and narrow nor as right as it may seem). Piss upon the shade cast in the angles of a tower and its walkway, made it shine with golden luster, an amber residue of human man or human woman passing whose marks, strong scents will tell their presence once along not on that avenue. It's all we ever know or knew of one and other before the sterile days. Call it "accident" of nature or miscreant who shits upon the doorways of buildings tall and narrow, towers to commemorate faceless heroes whose lives and acts we never knew; yes, shit within the door- ways, in the entrances of corporate towers that usurp the sight of heaven, that brief bright blue or starry night we glimpse by accident. Love lust and every passion; walk naked in their presence, make no excuse for being human. Your clothes are just a selfish skin to cover being human. All differents when truly naked, homeless, are one same. Buy another, listen closer, find yourself alongside someone homeless seeking among plainness something to call "self". Buy another, listen closer, find yourself related to another, someone homeless in the world which is home to all of us. Buy another, listen closer, a loss you loss is hidden in a tale spit on stripped bare windows and at passers who will not, fear to, listen. Be the tales told by strangers; hear their stories on your lips. Find some lost and true compassion before it is just memory, a history taught rote to children, a fantasy of individuality to bolster a false and cell-blocked sense of "me". Buy another, listen closer -- there was a man and there was a woman, the son and daughter a family. Each of us began as a truly social critter. Share another, listen closer…… © John Horváth Jr |
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Commentary: It's Suspicion Wrongs. But the protestant hymnal pattern of 3-4s is compressed into a line's length. Two of three functions of poetry are to unify and to distinguish. The divisive in Suspicion Wrongs (the one against another or "that bastard" response) is as valid as the unific…the urge to bring together different types or classes. The persona of "Joe" is that of G.I. "Joe" or any old Joe. These are faceless people whose identity is in large part imagined. Most people have not known and do not know intimately a drunk in the gutter or on a street corner. We shy away from those folk. Here the poem places one in your lap. Poetry's best use is, not in confessing one's own passions and life, but in observing, entering the other, exploring, and introducing the reader so that compassion, empathy, a sense of "being in this together" can be achieved. John Horváth Jr Bonfire contributor |