Maybe, Today, I Will Sit Down with Them by Steven Croft

I see the men every day on my way to work,
on the benches in the park by City Hall.  I see them,
nicknamed them: the dharma bums, but have the same
blind spot for them when walking by as the bankers
and businessmen.  Maybe today I will sit down, say
"nice day," fish out their stories -- where to bed down
when the light cones of lamps appear in windows
of warm houses, how to find laughter in bottles
on a no shoestrings budget, stay out of the insides
of jails.  Maybe today I will sit down with them
since every day I still wonder at their stories, but,
I will probably wait until my failures stack up
like in a Direct TV commercial, I start my last diary
like a doomed Southern Ocean explorer, ghost
before death in tattered coat, until the daily pursuit
of boozy bliss is the best thing in the world next to
the frontier value of a fire at night.  Until then, I guess,
I will walk by and hope

for a saint to bend down and kiss them, for the Pope
to come by and wash all their feet.

Steven Croft is an Army veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and liveson a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. His work has appeared in online and print journals, most recently in Ariel Chart, The New Verse News, and Quaci Press Magazine.