**WORK IN PROGRESS**

Man, the imperfect librarian.

Man, the retired salesman,

With neither money nor clothes.

When it rains,

It is better to sit with the salamanders.

*

The streets were fogging over & every building looked like a man, a form a figure that stood tall, & strong, & looking for a service. A Salesman who could discern neither right nor his left stood on somebody else’s porch because their light was on & he needed to stand in the light in order to digest a meal he hadn’t eaten yet.

It has become tiresome for him to look in mirrors. His Ragged face only looks compelling when he’s laughing, perhaps at himself, and when the reflection is seldom there. The books he reads appear to grow shorter and the lights in his room go out when he coughs. Maybe he does it to be funny, but every time he opens the door, he claps three times in jubilation & then he will weep and no one would see. He swore that because his words would not work that his breath is worth its weight in gold.

*

Would the remnants of what you can remember of your childhood fairy tales inform this place? Because there is no name for that now, both for this space and those words, it escapes me now and the salesman, too, who stretches by the shores and has canvased for a new belief in shadows.

There is a small shadow, or rather an echo for the sake of textual variety, and it is causing a disruption. It is shown on the wall at night when the children sleep, it could be a spire or a birch branch that is influenced by the wind… It wouldn’t matter, and it doesn’t.

Might the rhymes mean more when you have aged as a salesman? They do- and when you loose your ability to hear, it will be only those echoing limericks that stay between your ears, only them that you will see. Without one, there is no ‘All’ and therefore, there will be no others. You will not see, nor smell, and you could not feel, no matter how hard you try. You have grown frail and your humbled ears have failed you.

*

He aged here, in the silence of the subway, he aged there & his ears grew low to his shoulders. When it was cold outside, he would hunch over & because he couldn’t hear himself he would talk in broken Chinese, which he did not know, and he would cry. This wasn’t a sick man, and the turning of the days knew it. This was not a pathetic man, just He who wishes to petition time.

It all is rooted somewhere, all disorientation established from having once held oriented. By virtue of this flawed design, ‘We’ must be defined by exception. It shows itself only as agitation in the deaf, though audible, poets who refuse to walk the street except at night when there is fog.

There is a man,

There.

Seen in everything

& hard to see

when the weather is warm,

& the ground is cold.

There is a body,

There.

A figure,

Strong& seeking service.

And when the days are in such climactic discord, ‘There’ can only mean the destination of the song coming from the Salesman’s lips. He sits in the coffee shop. He sits at a table alone, his coat draped around his shoulders and his hands in his pockets. Patrons were moving, passing through the doorway, which would stick & stay open. As he shed the coat & it fell to the floor, he walked from one side of the room to the other, turned back down & returned to put on the scarf that was left on the table.

Your place of work becomes your social space, like the apartment he had when he was in college. There are significantly less beer cans around, but there remain the place settings of the patrons on tables where they sit, seldom alone.

He will quit one day, and sit there. Once paid for his time, but now loitering & he watches the tacky coats of the other people flap, unzipped, in the wind, which is cold. He couldn’t put a name to the make or material of which any of these coats were made, but their colors are distracting and attractive. His eyes will meet others as he catches the last of everyone’s’ conversations.

            “It’s not my fault,” and his legs shift in resistance to the impulse to jump on the table, resisting an acute urge to embrace an energy he has found in pointless frustration, & he yells silently, “You are all talking very loud.” Though, even in his own head, his breath trails below the seat on which he sits.

He stares at you because you look the way he should, & the order he intended to take out of turn ended up being yours. “I’m just waiting for a ride to work,” he lies.

The ceilings are etched to mock the crumby tin façade from a more prosperous time in coffee house history. His shoes are dirty, and his coat has gone missing. There is a copper clock with a single high voltage spotlight and while he watches the clock, unable to tell time, a blonde boy watches him. Outside, a woman in a wheelchair roles her head back and forth wearing a leopard print fur coat, lead by her son. He must have once been like our salesman, with a sweet smile and clothes that could fall off by a gust of wind. It would be rude to ask the status of his pockets that hang low as he guides the woman dressed as a distinguished feline. His pockets, though, shake with the shifting of nickels and dimes. It would be rude, but maybe he doesn’t know her and the Salesman never left his job. Maybe I would set someone free.

*

We’re really just…………………. Ugly. Walking through ageless sleep, pale faces and a cowboys posture, slightly slanted and always looking sideways.

We’ve got pale skin & rat hands, blushing by virtue of our complexion- stretched over fat we can’t come to terms with and muscle. Eyes that sad like the aged mind of the salesman whose ears reach his shoulders. He used to hold his lover there while they laid in bed………………………… The salesman whose ears reached his shoulders, which he hunched over and up when it was cold- You can see the purple bruises of dream hours and wretched fights, It takes so much effort to look in the mirror.

Let me walk away from you,

& I will draw a map.

I will tell you it is tiresome

& in the same way I hope to chart,

to long, to fog, my mirror-

It can only be covered by heat.

This will be chronicled by One.

He who has a fly in his eye,

& can orient.

Though- This salesman can not. He cannot discern his right, nor his left, and his feet carry him in circles around blessed cement, along the wall of some downtown alley.

There are bricks inside the window he can look into from the loading dock of the coffee shop, at which he sits alone and watches the people with their coats wet from the rain. There is brick inside that building in some jointed south-facing building façade. There is something elegant and charming about it. It’s a law office, the office of an attorney of law, and with our ink markings we glare with cigarettes and subtle attempts to ‘whoo’ the other ink marked kinds of kids. The salesman is lost in this exchange, unless he has been drinking at which point the words run too fluid and he pisses whiskey out in the downtown alley, on the south side of town near the coffee shop with the law office and the oddly jointed south-facing building façade inside the window, viewable from the loading dock.

*

After seven hundred years of cookies and stale bread, let me dream of Rome and arrive in California for what could be my last year of life. The Mediterranean Sea holds the heart of exodus in modern day- Men drowning as they run away from Spring, doomed to return again to nothing, where everything is welcomed. Be mine- dehumanized and naked in a public place. I am the prophet and I will only speak French. I hope you tell this story beautifully, something with borrowed music and seldom seen light.

We met there in a city neither of us knew. I look insulted because we speak different languages and you were drunk. There are decades between us and I am compelled to touch the bridge of your nose and confess, “I can not discern my right nor my left.” And I touch the bridge of your nose so I can draw it on the napkin you used and left, and again I touch your nose so I can draw you, so I can orient myself to the page.

Jesus walked in the room, I had canvased for him. We were petitioning time & every passer-by thinks we are sick men, tired and lonely. You missed his entrance, but he saw you and he saw me seeing him see you. We three looked at one another, and you swelled by the will of Genesis in a womb you didn’t know you had and we all smelled of over ripen tangerines.

 Jesus walked in the room; I no longer work for him.  He walked up to me as you watched, and I confessed, “My words are worth their weight in gold.” You watched as he walked to me and audibly you mumbled the mantra of the urban youth.

“I do not believe.” Though, in the end, it is the potentiality of this encounter, the fate of this potential encounter, epic eroticism with no communion, no copulation & ironic bouts of coitus.

We met there in that bar, in the city having just walked the same sidewalk where I gawked at you. We were both drunk and I refused to speak to you, but I touched you and Jesus walked in. We were swollen and you were pregnant and I wanted to sell you something.                                                                           

 *