(Gah, formatting. The lines are not how I wrote them, and I don’t really know how to make WordPress behave)
I.
I wake up with the news and am in no mood to endure it and come instead to visit with you.
On my way to you a few blocks up from the ferry dock
a car is broken in the road in everyone’s way (the nerve).
It is too broken even to roll – The driver said as much.
Other people in unbroken cars have to be somewhere now always now
so they honk, gesture, wave and blame.
People blame him with their hands and their eyes
People are very good with the things they do with their eyes
Their eyes say that yes they see but they need and
their need cannot be defeated.
Certainly not by him and his broken car
Certainly not by him
II.
This is what people look like to me, when I don’t slow down.
This is what I see of people in my cynical times
what I know of them raging against some poor man’s trials
and what it does to them.
(He is no poor man. He does not suffer)
These people woke up watching the news and they’re listening to it in their cars
where they honk at him and they are believing it, the news.
All the time they are believing it.
Right now as their palms press down on the cold molded
February of steering wheel plastic
and their horns blare the sound of their need they are believing the news because the news moves everything
out of their way.
They think it is real.
But not him or his car.
They don’t believe in him or his car because it is
in front of them and in the way.
They don’t believe in things that are in the way.
They don’t believe in things that the news can’t move out of their way.
They decide not to believe.
They just decide like that.
This is what people look like to me when I don’t slow down.
III.
Someone’s buying him…
…I slow down here…
…and gather myself…
…someone’s buying him a coffee.
She walks a coffee out to him
She reaches
out
He reaches
and in that blesséd beat when both of their hands are on the offering
someone honks.
God damn it.
Paradise, lost
IV.
God damn I go slow
He’s on the hood of his broken car, the half-sit you do sometimes
with one heel cocked up on the bumper.
Looking undefeated with coffee and listening nowhere to the news.
Getting up when he needs to direct traffic and doing it like he’s done it before. With a half-smile and that knife-hand pointing, arm extended,
fingers and thumb pressed together in flat, playful authority.
This way is clear.
You picture the whistle, the white glove
(the traffic cop)
V.
It isn’t a very busy intersection back here in our neighborhood near the bakery.
When I go slow it is his unflappable traffic direction,
all smiles and gifted coffee on a February morning just up the road from the ferry dock
It is his this, his him
his he
he is it, the thing –
he is the thing that hits me right where I need it and when
back here in the corner of the bakery just up the road from the ferry dock.
When the boat comes it will bleed out and he will be busy with people
who will honk their news at him. They will honk what they believe at him
from their unbroken cars full of need.
He will not see his empty paper cup roll half-circle off the hood
when he gets up to be something they don’t believe in.
He will point, and wave, and smile while he slows them down
to show them how to get around him and when.
Andy Havens 