A Man, Today

In a square, in a city, in a country I'd never known, a man approached me from the ground saying he'd made the dirt and gutter his home. His introduction quick, void of inhibition, no name no title his place with the untouchables was beyond prayer or superstition. A dirty earth had made him tan, birth had stolen his legs, his arms rippled with another days work, he reached for gifts with manic hands. The man had become a rapid beneath a city's stampede, he drug himself through the ignorant river waiting for that fallen tree branch to grasp and climb and be freed. He was king of a castle noone took time to see, an invisible kingdom of the waste and shit that drips from you and me. We rejected his resignation and returned him to his throne and masked our shame and robbed his potential and made improvements upon our homes. Off one road of broken brick and curbs and on to explore another, enslaved a coffee can as his crutch, he asked for help in screams, then pleas, then mutters. He had dropped his trident, his staff of sovereign shambles, so I fetched it from the dust and returned it to him with the blessings of a thousand priests that ramble. With no regard for the Man of the revolution, I elevated my eyes from this fleshly manifest of human pollution; to make my speech and reveal how I'm righteous, I needed to not see the piss upon this excrement so I could feel like I could fight this. I made my fists and I clenched my jaw and stood with teary eyes, and the masses wept a touching poem-of-promises called, "the abolishment of demise". And all the while a starving man, with whom we'd all since lost touch, watched a thousand armies march in a movement amounting to not much. All he needed was a meal, he told me from the level of my shoe lace, but our ears were deaf to reality beyond the ceremonies of saving face. That night, his majesty died in the cold of his potato sack suit, crimped and mangled by the failure of social ideas the struck advocates as "too new". His carcass decreed the ally, bartering with the walls to tell his final tales to the ears of his absent family. His hand gripped discarded wrappers where only scents remained, the aroma of grease boasted others' peace which his desperation had borne into fame. The eyes of the fallen king refused to close completely, his head leaned back, he lay on his side; his muscles still clenched from shivering in the night, loneliness and hunger forever his loyal brides.