Like the Fine Suits They Are

The man reading the paper is there every morning.
Well dressed. Perfect shoes.
A cup of cappuccino on his table.
The business of the narrow street flows around him.
He is polite – you have seen him interact
with the waiter. Polite, but not warm,
he has a certain bearing. He stands out
among the tourists and workers
on their way to shops and scenery.

You once dated a woman who believed
she could sit at a table and tell you
about every person in the room. She saw,
she said, every person’s story.
You never knew whether to believe her.
She missed so much that was right in front of her.
But one never knows. Nearsighted. Farsighted.
It could happen with souls and stories
as well as with eyesight.

Still, she changed your habits, and today,
so many years later, you look
at people on your periphery and imagine
their stories. Make of them fiction and poetry.
Paint them in your mind. The difference is,
you know it is fiction. Like a writing exercise,
or perhaps an exercise in living.
Less a test than a possibility,

It is a narrow crooked little street
in a foreign land. It could be here.
The place does not matter. The story is the same.
We have lost the art of intimacy,
or perhaps, even sadder,
we have lost the art of feeling safe
enough to wear our stories
like the fine suits they are.

About this poem.

Intimacy is a lost art in today’s world. With more ways to communicate than ever before, somehow we do it less and less well. Never feeling quite safe enough to be as real as we yearn to be.

This poem started as a poem about treading water. I have no idea how it got to where it ended up. I love being a poet. Ecentricity is allowed.

The photograph was taken in Venice.

Tom