Messengers

You who count yourselves among the melancholiacs,

talking to the invisible, will understand

why I seek to find myself and fail

in citizens considered doomed by most.

Consider the families called the mall rats

inhabiting an abandoned shopping center near the

river.

You tell me they sell drugs, they sell themselves?

I think petty thievery is their sustenance.

I know, on faith, a child born last New Year's there,

was delivered by fire maintained in an oil drum

stuffed with Christmas wrappings we trashed at a

neighboring dump,

and the harbinger who came forth, trumpeting his birth,

was that Elijah, seven feet, palms uplifted to the sky,

who wanders our highways at all hours, proclaiming,

declaiming.

One day it's the world's end, the next the world's

beginning.

Do you cross his palms as I do with small change

when he accosts you at the stoplight? You say

the child has disappeared, the prophet's left for

Armageddon?

I tell you: I hear him in my prayers tonight, wandering

aisles of the shopping center after dinner,

consumed with the search for a birthday gift for my son,

a pair of boxing gloves, a submachine gun, atomic

missiles

guaranteed to raise him to stand alone among men.

I who have these voices, too, and turn to you with them.