The beggar man

I had never seen such a dramatic turn in a person
It was though a switch had been thrown
And his city of neon extinguished
This was a white darkness
If you could have such a thing
Pale and ghostly lay his palette
He was not shy, he let me see it
Though his eyes stayed drifting at floor level
Straining to look up
Only very occasionally making contact
He tried to explain
What had happened
That damn manic depression
That damn high and low
Might have known one was on the way
He said that he could not connect with the world before him.
An arrangement of trendy affluent shoppers
In a trendy millennium zone shopping mall
Upper class artists
Even the beggars were clean shaven
And I understood exactly what he meant.

He can’t connect with this, these people are ants.
They carry bags like grains of sugar
Obvious and intelligent they own homes
They create short cuts
Use phones and sat nav
They call in air Cava for support in the form of credit cards
They fall for organic food
Go to market stalls
But it all means nothing
The happier they are the harder it is
The more there are the bigger the hole
The lighter the glass hall
The further the fall to black
And the tears become difficult to train
To hold back and like a cliché image in rain
You cannot tell they are there

I felt if I ask the beggar man
He would be the only reliable connection
The others too synthetic
Rather like the chemical structure of man made medicine
If I cry to the beggar man I feel he would understand
I feel sure no middle class cliché will pass his lips
Like “snap out of it”
My depression can find a friend in his
My addiction to this mystery can rest alongside
His begging bowl
I can kneel, or just fold, or curl
Or stretch out on the marble and pearl of the mall
And not worry about presentation
About being false
About trying to integrate
I can gaze with him through plate glass
Back at the middle class, ridiculous Sunday
And the harbour docks
The urban splash development