Emotional Romantic:

[athlone]

It was at a poetry reading that I met The Lonely Man.
He had arrived early, as had I.
His aged peaked cap and weathered nose intruded
self-consciously into the aroma of the coffee shop.
Wearing his beard like a muffler against the cold of despair,
he approached our table,
drawn in, like a primeval cosmic body at the birth of the universe,
forming a nucleus of human contact
amidst the cold interstellar background
of a late Tel Aviv evening.

I offered him my hand,
like throwing a lifebuoy to a drowning man.
He shook it limply,
implying that he had long ago resigned himself
to the fate of a castaway.
Perhaps comfortable in his watery milieu,
a solitary dolphin,
attracted by the lighted ships that pass in the night.
Drawn by curiosity, but anchored to familiarity.

“Do you write?” I ventured lamely.
“Oh no,” he replied with infinite sadness,
“I don’t know how to express myself in words.”
“And yet there is something of the artist about you…” I continued
in a desperate attempt to resuscitate our ebbing contact.
“I draw…,” he replied, as if my attempt at verbal first aid
had been answered by the first spontaneous intake of breath.
“Would you like to see?”

The Lonely Man had been pulled back
from the brink of conversational extinction.
In an exuberance of joyful reanimation he pulled a digital camera
from the deep recesses of his billowing jacket.
“I drew this in crayon while on a train journey in The States”.
The illuminated screen was thrust before me as proof
that The Lonely Man had another existence, an alternate universe.

The scene depicted glowed in vivid childlike hues.
An impossibly azure sky crowned a verdant pasture
on which stood a group of people forming a circle.
The pasture was bisected by a river
the same color as the sky, flowing from a distant mountain.
On the far bank of the river stood a house,
and beached next to the house was a small boat.

“Do you notice anything special about the house?” enquired
The Lonely Man.
“It only has two windows,” I replied hesitantly,
seeking approval of my acuity.
“And no doors!” he added jubilantly.
“That’s my house. I have no doors, I can’t get out!”
“And,” my subconscious added, “no one else can get in…”
He scrolled the view to focus on the circle of figures.
“That’s me,” he pointed at a spindly representation
in the lower right-hand quadrant of the circle,
“with my granddaughter on my knee.”

“Ah,” I exhorted joyously, “so you can get out of the house!”
But my joy was premature.
He would not relinquish his sadness so easily,
certainly not for so casual a stranger as I.
“It was a long and difficult journey,” he explained,
referring with a nod to the picture on the camera screen.
“I had to climb that mountain…”
“But you could have used the boat,” I retorted,
caught up in his imagery.
“Look closer,” he instructed with the patience of a true master
guiding the naïve novice.
“The boat only has one oar!”
I was outmaneuvered and outgunned.
It would take a more skillful adversary than I
to break through his self-perpetuating solitude.

The evening continued pleasantly enough,
each poet in turn rendering his soul
through a prismatic filter of verbal construct.
Then the aged peaked cap and weathered nose
took his place behind the microphone
in the illuminated center of that light-starved room
and I waited with bated breath.
“I am A Lonely Man…” he began.

[erikestabrook]

lovely story here athlone I especially like the in-depths feeling of the picture analysis

[nomadicrhymer]

athlone, you paint a very detailed and emotional picture yourself...and now I want to know the end!!!

this is in essence a beautiful and sad depiction of where we can consciously take ourselves...rejoicing, as it were, in the misery...seemingly triumphant of the fact that we are immovable in our state...

awesome insight!

Nomad