The Man in the Street

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

How often
is he there
in front of you?

Just another bloke
like you

except, perhaps,
a lack of personal hygiene

or its pathological opposite,

his way of regarding you
far too directly
without blinking

for the longest time.

When he asks for a cigarette
do you oblige

in spite of yourself?

Because in this stark room
you cannot reconcile
the rhetoric

on the face of it –

just another human being
in the silence,

no manifest difference
to teach the rookies,

no monster in plain sight
to slay with a bedside light,

just this banality
of evil

sitting in the corner
of your nightmares.

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