It sounds like a children’s game
played with an energy of rope.
Stepping over, stepping around —
I saw someone playing it.
She was wearing a pink skirt
and played it at the station.
A man sprawled, pungent as durian,
at the top of the steepish steps.
Delicately, she stepped around;
a wily politician adept
at avoiding a sticky question.
Longer legs allowed the next commuter,
the one in in the suit, to step over the man.
For a moment he was an equation,
the cool guy in the suit,
and the collapsed man the vinculum
dividing the rear leg from the front.
No need for our dapper stepper
to interrupt his smartphone chatter.

And some of us step over and around
by using him for clever poems —
grounding them in a certain reality —
restrained muggers of another’s pain.

PS Cottier

PS Cottier gets up. PS Cottier feeds the budgie. PS Cottier writes. PS Cottier blogs at pscottier.com. PS Cottier sleeps. Do all this, and you too can be Perfectly Serene Cottier.

© 2017