But this is small. Exhaustion
multiplies. Street theater, an empty stadium. A player throws a
baseball high in the stands where no one retrieves it. The old
warehouse was where one vendor's father collected unemployment; today
the vendors didn't bark. No drinks, no popcorn, no cracker jacks.
Just absence of riot in absence of person. As if. I told my student
not to use the word “just,” but it's just the word for what's missing.
Freddy Gray dying in the back of a van stopping one time more than we
knew. So much we don't know, the not
peeling like lead paint from walls of apartment blocks. That was not
spinal surgery: a not cinder block crushed his larynx. It's his not
speaking we hear. He wrote about a fragile door. Ours to occupy this
limen,
or sidewalk
whose cracks mark meaning that cannot matter. What is just
surpasses it.
--30
April 2014