He wears his sunglasses at night
To hide himself from the darkness
Scared what his eyes might see
Afraid what others would see if they saw (saw him looking back)
So he glances through a tinted darkness into a shadowed blackness
Walking
Bumping into this and that
His unforgiving feet scurrying away
Shoulder’s hunched

“The night is so hideous”

such thoughts causing him to wonder…..
wonder why he would only come out at the fall of the day
when the night had risen,
engulfing everything

“Why is it only ugliness I walk through?”

Yet ugliness intermingles with beauty
A beauty his eyes could comprehend and focus on
If only he were to raise his head
and release himself from his magnified tinted obscurity
He would see the lusciously plump moon
shimmering through a blanket of clouds
glistening on puddles

He would notice the flickering stars
blinking down from the heavens
rotating across the velvety atmosphere
Ancient connect-the-dots
Horoscope figures,
which some claim can predict the outcome of our daily existence

He would hear the crickets
serenading the earth
lulling drifters

Yet he sees none of this
To raise his head would be a discomfort
A threat to his reality
For all he knows is pain
And anything else would be strange and foreign entity
A something he would not understand

Happiness
Beauty
Love
These are simply strange fascinations
that cause him to cower
Fleeing to the comfort of a painful familiarity

So he bumps around in his darkness
Unknowingly smearing a small cricket serenader
across the soles of his shoes
Smudged and forgotten,
Like a sticky piece of gum
That someone rolled up with their tongue
and spat out on the side walk
Not enough flavor to satisfy

Life spread on the black soles of a man’s shoe
Who sees not the shimmering water of a puddle that children splash and play in
He sees only the mud which it contains

Moonbeams do not penetrate the tint of his plastic darkness
Even if it could,
What would it matter?
For his head is hung low
His gaze is fixcated on hard cold concrete
the same cold surface children scrape their knees on

The sun will shine
Waking the world from a sleepy aww which had it hypnotized
Yet he will not notice
For before then he will have shut himself away in a hole
Behind a door connected to a roof
That he would never refer to as home sweet anything
And there he will stay,
brooding on the darkness he unknowingly chooses to walk in
Wondering when the sun will rise