Journal Square: when dusk runs out

May 10, 2013

The air grows warm finally, kissing my cheeks as I sit on the cold stairs of Journal Square.

Dusk drips into dark but without the bite winter usually brings.

But everything causes pain at times, the chattering child winter brings, the scalding heat of summer.

Somehow I manage to keep my balance, doing what I need to keep from falling off the edge of what should be a flat earth.

The homeless linger here at the edge of the plaza, clinging to it with desperate broken fingernails, the cycles of heat and cold mapped across their faces like a road map of no planet I want any part of.

But even the worst of these, the most down and out, the most desperate seem to have their own sense of dignity, hating pity as much as I hate heat and cold.

Even begging, they seem determined not to lose that last ounce of whatever it is that makes up human, insisting on standing up on one foot if that’s all they have, some conning me with real or pretended grief, yet still playing the game to win, looking even when they have only one eye to look at me with. But in the world of the blind, they say, a man with one eye can still be king, and here we all are struggling not to lose ourselves when in the dark when dusk runs out.