By Reginald S. Lewis
Propped up conveniently
on crumpled sections of old newspapers,
twisted and piled in a most precarious pyramid.
The eyes of the blond man
are riveted upon the old woman.
Bearing down on those filthy rags he
imagined she’d worn since time immemorial.
As always with these people,
these perfidious vagabonds,
he anticipated the piteous mewling,
the tales of woe he knew all to well
to be nothing more than a desperate ruse
of some scandalous street magician,
tongue rattling, hands moving furtively
across the crucible of the eye
in that subliminal flash that can
only be interpreted as the
faintest flicker of magic,
something you knew not to be true
yet wanted to believe, those sad stories,
money to ride a chariot to the moon,
money for hot coffee and a crusty bagel,
money for parlaying a wicked,
non-negotiable past into the mundanity
of three-tiered cakes and
sweet apple pies, or perhaps,
a soft warm bed,
all those mannequins peeking out
and the cherubic faces of angels
who appear in the night
delivering the hot food and warm blankets.
This was the wrought-iron bed
She told them on which she could sleep forever.
This was the place she called home.
She thinks that she’ll lose it one day,
She thinks she’ll lose it
By mortgage foreclosures, or perhaps
a seizure by some heartless banker.
And she is afraid her lovely home
will be defenestrated by some
raving lunatic one night, maybe
during the dead of winter,
and she would be beaten and
kicked into oblivion.
Weeks later she’ll wake up in some cool,
antiseptic hospital, fighting death-demons.
and finally,
the horde of white-jacketed tormentors
who’ll come to drag her away
to some state-run hospital for crazies,
where she’d be constantly bombarded
with the shock treatments and
the psychotherapy and the lithium.
They’ll take her so far out.
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