Monday

We have all been expelled from the garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

–Stanley Kunitz, “Reflections”

As God was his witness, the guy said, he was not shitting me. What he was telling me was exactly the fucking truth. Look at him. He was as bad off as those poor motherfuckers in New Orleans.

That fucking hurricane, that fucking flood, that was just the way it was, that was his sorry excuse for a life every fucking day for more years than he could remember. He didn’t have shit to his name. He’d lost everything. But, no, fuck that, he hadn’t lost everything. It was worse than that; he’d had it taken away.

Look at me, he kept insisting, you can see what I am. This is it, brother. The teeth is gone. I don’t know if my mama is dead or alive, but even if she’s alive somewhere she long ago forgot about me.

All sorts of shit was ailing him. His knee was fucked from getting run over on his bicycle. It could rain on his sorry ass every day until Jesus came back and nobody’d look at him twice.

Throw you a rock in this world and you’d hit someone just like him. Wasn’t nobody holding no telethon to give him back his fucking life.

Look around, he said. You see any fucking television people down here interested in my sorrow? Maybe I’m not even real, he said, maybe I’m already dead and scrappin’ metal in hell.