THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON

69. THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON:

For a farther other language he is writing in there is no reason or occlusion to be determined and just like endless people lined up for something free there are eyes and noses seeking to come to it and that is acceptable but needs a reason AND BY THAT I see the men lined up in two’s along the downtown mission for their feeding their 2pm free-food talkfest and they are lined morosely looking back at me who used to be with them (so long now so seemingly very long ago Bowery-days long-lost days of other times) and I merely looked back at them and said "was once when I fed so many of you and now you must fend for yourselves" and that having to do with the five or six turkeys and clothing I’ve given to that mission over the last few years YET I think ‘how many other men who leave a previous life return like this quite accidentally to the scene of so much of that previous life and then are face to face with that change that loss that leaving?’ and with that I almost shuddered to think of these men one after the other all forlorn and sodden and across the street nearer to me is a man warily waiting for us to pass by so that he can privately pee on the side of the truck he is using as a block to prevent people seeing him from doing what he must do and so I pass along not to interrupt him nor delay him and it is all the same for I know HIS story and HIS and HIS and determined to be different none really are but the slow dead light of failure and loss and passion takes its toll on so many of them and all we can do is help them then live within that loss and keep on and go on and maintain a certain minimal composure at least and (I daresay) then isn’t that why we feed them at all ? it has nothing to do with salvation or Jesus or the cross though we’d like to think it does but NO for that is only the motivation of the other side - those inside who are doing it - for they have made up the charade of their own meanings and outside there the men whom they are feeding and aiding know nothing of those other motivations THEY MERELY TRAVEL ON and in that BY THAT traveling they forge the very world they’ll live in for time and rehash their own arguments and re-do their experiments and castigate themselves for this or that until just maybe UNTIL that one day arises when they’ve had enough and are found to themselves willing to break free in whatever and from whatever way they can to go on and step forward and become another man one not known before and all it really takes is a certain form of gumption and (as I know it) a loss of fear of being ridiculed and separate and alone and for once all that’s out of the way no one nowhere anybody would ever make a difference before and like some audience with oneself so much of the interview’s success is contingent upon so much of which questions are asked.