Keith Walton
A Propos de Nice
The rich are buttoned up.
They sit in the sun in their three-piece suits.
They are buttoned up because
they’re so full, they have so much
that it’s about to spill out all the tine.
It takes dedication to hold in what they have,
concentration lest they suffer the embarrassment
of things falling out of them, piling up around them,
trailing behind them. It is hard work, being rich.
So they sit very still, buttoned up.
The poor man’s clothes are pinned together.
The poor are pinned together.
Each is a piece of paper folded into the shape
of a person forever on the point of falling apart -
the paper unfolds and there’s nothing there,
except hunger, or rather need,
a blank sheet blown this way and that
that need folds and refolds to catch something, anything,
to fill an emptiness that’s never relieved.
I passed the young man as I walked
from car, to café, to gallery, to restaurant,
to cinema. Each time I gave him a coin.
He didn’t acknowledge me at all, saw simply
a hand, a coin, each time. It was raining.
He said, to no one in particular, ‘I have to get into a hostel:
I can’t spend the night in this,’ pressing
his soaking tee-shirt. There was an edge, an urgency
almost a wildness in the way he spoke.
Or maybe he was putting it on.
As I was going into the cinema,
I said to myself, ‘if he’s still there when I come out,
I’ll give him what he needs for a hostel.’
But when I came out, he was gone.
Page(s) 186
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