Tuesday 127: Q train, Atlantic Avenue

Q train, Atlantic Avenue.



It goes like most days; I am planted like a platform,
unremarkable;
hair decided and girl-pale with big sentence;
to be a beautiful person
is to be giftpretty; a shadow
in cheap Mary Janes.

What I think is nothing; what I
is capture;
across the train and shade bangs
framing a twitch in my own leg;
you can’t
see lips or eyes or nose ring and don’t look for;

The bird kicks
a trickle plain as day, no
hawk wind through nolife trees down here;
here
a red cooler of arepas and laughing echoes;

yeah I well I’ve stayed busy
all the same;

I’m not a religious person, but I was raised in whatever counts as modern Christendom, a Catholic in a decidedly Protestant country, for whatever that’s worth. One of the more familiar aphorisms that I think of a lot (and which no doubt appears in some form in every major holy book on the planet), is “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Pretty straightforward Jesus stuff: The biggest takeaway for me was always that being a good person was never easy. In the abstract, it’s easy to envision “the least of these my bretheren” as doe-eyed waifs, or pliant victims. In reality, our least brethren are often not just indigent, but complex. They are actors and have agency. They’re probably real assholes a lot of the time.

Being a good person in an increasingly shitty world—a world whose shittiness creates more and more opportunity to be charitable—isn’t any easier. It’s probably harder.

Anyway, that’s not what the poem’s about, that’s just something I was thinking about this morning when I was out walking and a guy spit at my feet, said something untoward to a young woman walking by, then asked me for a dollar. How difficult it would have been to just smile gently and give it to him. How unrewarding. But then, it’s not supposed to be rewarding. It can’t be. It is, however, freeing. Is that the lesson? I never carry cash anymore anyway.

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