UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/M.P. POWERS


	UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY

M.P. POWERS

The Village Idiot

He’s forever adorned in a security guard’s uniform
he dredged up in some ancient lumber yard,
but the shirt’s too small,
exposing his belly between the buttons,
and he tore off the patches on the arms,
and his ample pants are pea-green and rumpled;
they’re tired of wearing him,
they’re tired of this life, on him.

And he sleeps behind an abandoned Jiffy Lube
on a pile of dirty U-Haul blankets,
walling himself in with engine parts
and the backs of wooden chairs,
and the track-lighting he stripped
out of someone’s bathroom
on some job he once lucked into.

And at night he wanders the streets
searching through garbage heaps
for anything half-salvageable;
when he finds it he drags it
back to his lair
like an alley cat
dragging back its latest kill,
and everyone says he’s a harmless idiot,
but he’s got a warrant out for his arrest
for attempted murder,
for scraping someone’s throat with a knife,
someone who trashed his worthless inventories
and laughed about it.

And he operates on the bottom floors
of humanity, doing the most deplorable
drudgery
for petty cash -
he once was a plumber’s lackey,
he once was a sanitation urchin,
he’s always the lowest common denominator
in a crowd,
and one time he hired a prostitute,
not for sex,
but to “lay” with him for the night,
because he didn’t know where else to go
for a human touch,
because the humans don’t want him,
they only want to help him
from a distance,
from a gap he’ll never close
despite all his efforts,
because it’s not help he wants,
it’s love,
the one thing
that in all his wanderings
he’ll never salvage,
the one thing he just can’t reach.

M.P. Powers has a poem coming out in Nerve
Cowboy's next issue, and has been published
in Identity Theory, Poems Niederngasse,
Ascent Aspirations, and The Dead Mule School
of Southern Literature.