Poems with Teeth: victim

Showing posts with label victim. Show all posts

7/12/22

He passes me on the street, his hair

matted, skin polished with grime,

muttering, suit stained and stiffened—

and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a

sign of beauty and power. But his hands,

strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and

flap slightly as he walks, like hands of

someone who has had polio, hands

that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his

piss, I see the ingot of his beard,

and think of my younger brother, his beauty,

coinage and voltage of his beard, his life

he is not using, like a violinist whose

hands have been crushed so he cannot play—

I who was there at the crushing of his hands

and helped to crush them.