by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: June 28, 2008

THE PARK

He wrenches himself around on the park bench
and wrings the air dry of politeness.
Swaddled in his smells, furzed, in a dinge of rag,
he embarrasses everyone but himself
with his raddling polemical spit and
troches of scummed rage swallowed back
to burn the breast's first milk
from his tongue's root.
Riddled with his own visions
as looned as any monk limping in a desert

he makes manifest the noise of his decay
makes skittish everyone in the ambit of his spasm
for the accident of their own dumb luck
reflected in his seeled and mirroring face.
On his park bench he is an imposition
on the comfortable privacy carried in public places,
a threat to cause a philanthropy
that is not a donation but the coin
of an actual attention spent.

Across the park, under umbrella'd oak trees,
a sprawl of children from the YWCA day care
mine the lodes of brown bags and metal boxes,
their chatter and playing a snacking for pigeons
from misaimed sandwiches and left-behind cookies.
The young sensible girls who cordon them,
herders for pay with some redeem of kidlove,
with faces undimmed as a sheet of white paper,
talk without mark, their bodies lined with good life
blending so easily into the format of the world.
The children leave behind an upfling of birds
as they rattle the shaded air of the public park
and stuff their waste in garbage cans;
the girls prod them along with used commands,
waiting for afterwork and the company of freetime.

Same public park, same city, same daytime,
worlds distant radical and unhinged -
such inserts into the routine spike the blinders,
leave me baffled and moral-less for conclusion.
He is what he is, they are what they are,
which is to say the obvious,
which is to say nothing at all -
leaves the connection unfinessed between
the trump of his dissolve and
the trick of their starting lives. And
it's not enough to say that they might become him,
that he was once one like them,
draw out the "there-but-for's" as selvaged lessons
on right ways of losing innocence.
What are the binds and miters that will converge
these immiscible forevers of living,
what will make sense of such unglued juxtaposes?
There is an insoluble gait to this life
that wears these questions down so thin
that we must give in to the habits
of our retinas and our principles
or else recognize that they are so thin
that they are nothing, that any answers
are also nothing,
that bums will rail next to children
who ignore and ridicule
and the only reality will be the useless
uprush of pigeons circling for food,
settling down, pecking and haunting the sidewalks,
dying in droves out of our sight.

Learn more about this author, Michael Bettencourt.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.