Seen

                                                         Photo Credit: Shine Gonzalvez
           http://www.trendsandlife.com/artistic-photographs-homeless-people-facing-challenges-streets/

We learn to name what we see.

We call it like we see it: black, white, tall, short, good, bad, clean, dirty.

We memorize the categories, and secure everything in neat little boxes.

Order from chaos. Sense from nonsense. Clarity from confusion.

Then he wanders into the coffee shop, same as any Tuesday morning­­, and opens all the boxes.

Without asking or checking, he puts the black with the white,

the tall with the short, the good with the bad, the clean with the dirty.

The muddy-eyed one with dirty knees and no title,

the one who you thought was just high, shameless, relentless.

The one who had been in that same booth,

in that same corner, every Tuesday for months.

He came in to take a break from holding a sign,

from doing nothing, you had to assume.

But he saw you. 

Checking your eyebrows in the mirror,

checking your phone,

checking that the barista got your name right on your extra-hot latte order.

If they wrote “Lindy” one more time, you were so done with this place.

But you never really saw him. 

He lingered somewhere in your peripheral vision,

far enough away that you couldn’t see the hole in his sock,

or the weight on his shoulders.

Far enough away that you didn’t notice the pencil unevenly sharpened with a pocketknife,

or the nails bitten between the verses he pressed into his notebook.

He sketched your profile once,

when you threw your head back laughing at something your daughter said.

He wanted to remember what love looked like.

He barely remembered when he had laughed like that,

before the voices, and the meds, and the vision problems.

When you came into the coffee shop that morning, you saw it,

framed by unfinished wood on the wall above the corner booth.

You knew it was a sketch of you by the birthmark on the neck,

and the streak of gray hair spilling down one shoulder.

It only showed when you really laughed hard.

“In memory of our friend Bart. May you get new eyes and sharp pencils on the other side” 

the brass caption read.

Then you remembered his dirty knees,

his shaky hands, and the nervous writing.

He seemed paranoid, always hunched over a notebook.

That homeless guy. The drug-addict.

But it was just Bart, sketching and writing to distract himself from the voices.

Sitting inside to rest his knees.

Seeing you, “Laurie,” laughing.