Tonight's Poet Corner: A Hospitable Man

A Hospitable Man
by Belinda Roddie

At the clinic
where I'd paid my dues in
all civilized functions of society,
from the

tip book drawn out ribbons of
inadequate emotional tenderness
served on conveyor belts
to the gray,
cold, wide-eyed
surveyors of all things hope,

to the

jar of cookies given to the
wretched ladybug
perched on the second floor window
whispering little trances
to the apartment complex next door -

I found myself with relatively spare time
to seek out
a new friend
located between Mrs. Hamilton's
screaming fits
and the tiny 108 room that never
seemed to stay full.

A man had been rolled in
on his stomach
after a nervous breakdown
(though the term nervous breakdown
is

never
ever used these days -
it's just not that appropriate, you see)

and he now
resided
in room 112
overlooking the Chinese restaurant
leading into the wide-mouthed,
red-lipped, white-tongued
downtown orgasm that was
the new city.

When I came in with a copy of
his favorite book, a Hemingway classic
that had been trans-adapted
into a poetic epic by T.S. Elliot's
long-lost cousin's widower, I noticed

that he liked to wear a face that seemed
aged, like cheese - the creases in the
hairy mold, pressure applied
throughout every line and divot
of his gray, white, smelly turf
that surrounded his outrageously
protruding
upper lip.

He was a very
hospitable person. When the
girlfriend didn't want to
see me one evening, he
invited me to the pick-up truck
owned by one of the nurses
outside, where we'd drink from

cafeteria milk cartons
that were dried out by the heat
of the kitchen's ceiling lamps,
and he'd keep smiling that same ripe,
dairy smile.

I wondered where he had come from,
if anywhere - what sort of madness
he had contracted from an apricot
jungle or some pestilence of genetic
rambunctiousness sucked from the
teeth of a scientist's lab rat - or perhaps
why in the name of everloving God

he was here, instead of the moon,
or somewhere between the spheres of
lazy Jupiter and sick Saturn,
the latter of which gnawed on its rings
like a broken plastic pacifier.

When I grew better acquainted with him, I learned
that his name was Larry - a quaint enough name
for these times when Jacobs and Emily's ran the
game of name charts all the way down to the bottom
ten. He had been a professor of pseudo-technological
advances with a dash of honest philosophy (and yes, I

did not switch those terms around), with a knack for
fixing wires of computers like greasing up
dental floss between two stubbornly resisting
molars, white knick-knacks modeled up
for display after a bit of tinkering with a
tinker-toy hammer and some lego pieces.

By the time he was wheeled out -
on both feet now, no less, standing
quite upright, smiling
with the pasty cheddar gleam around
his bicuspid jubilations - I watched
him go without so much as a
philosophical message or motto to live by.
You expect to learn something from your elders,
when really, what you get
is the simple

artistic easel of restraint,
little to no oil dripping from its colored corners,
and with just the faintest odor of
fresh,
milky clay.