Don’t look.

Step around.

My largely absent father grabs my hand and steers
me around a bundle of rags on crazed concrete
in the Bad Part of the capitol of Illinois.  Litter
and filth provide a little traction on the ice 
that has refused to melt following a blizzard.
Blinking and throbbing beer and whiskey signs
are turning everything Christmas red and green
except the low object Daddy growls to avoid. Turns
out it is a man. Gray face? Gray hair? No gloves,
one sock. “Is he dead, Daddy?” “Daddy?” “Why
is there a dead man lying on the sidewalk?” “He
isn’t?” “Shouldn’t we wake him? Shouldn’t we
make him go inside? Are you going to find a phone
and call for an ambulance?” “But he will freeze
to death if we. . .I am walking as fast as I can.”
“Ice is so hard to see.”

Only other light is the funeral home blue that outlines
the hoary panes of the mullioned window of a bar
called Kayo’s and three lamps spaced too far apart
to help. Shadows writhe between their sinking posts.
There would be decades when I would live in the dark.
Wasn’t a lump repulsing on the sidewalk in front of
some dive, I tried.   Dark night of the soul, a mystic
put it. Body staggers in its wake, trying to keep
from slipping and falling.

Still see the poor sod.

                               (c)  Phyllis Jean Green
                                               December, 2010