At the community table, let's be nice.

Washington,


I want to love you. I really can't love you, but I want to.
You're assertive and unhelpful in manifold ways.
A city that wishes not to be civil, despite the political charade.
The blessed are not one step ahead on the escalator.
The blessed are not those who will to power, who run the races but have no riches in character.
To settle for the game? To this I am indignant.


I want to love you but I want to train you more.
That is no healthy relationship, that involves a sort of leash.
I sit down at your community table to reconcile and am looked over for my seat by a lunching couple.
They didn't want to dialogue, they wanted to eat.
Next to me, not with me.


My manner is hostile to you, Washington, and mistaken for naivety.
Like the waitress who pulled me aside on "a personal note".
She said to me: "You don't have to move for them. Next time just let them find another place to sit."
I understand that I need not always be "nicey nice" but to scold me for making a little space?
Pardon me, if it is some infringement on your conscience.


She is nice, even while growing teeth!

In the smirks of my niece is where I come home, and in a strong cup of Peets.
Both are not "of" you Washington.
And it's true of me too.
I'm not sure if I'm settled with that paradox.
Warm sentiments have their place, and it isn't here.


I want to love you Washington, but I wish to teach you a lesson  more.
The wisdom of my older sister is profitable in all this foolishness.
At four-years-old, she made this declarative statement into the video camera that is hard to forget:

"When tigers bite, you have to stand back."

The truth could not be more plain.
She didn't say that tigers don't bite.
Or even to get mad at tigers when they do.
She only said that when  tigers bite,
When they push and shove, and blast that sucker who cut them off in the round-about,
now subjected to a sounding horn for the next minute, to stand back.


To take in what has happened to make that person such a pill, and determine not to become one.
As quick as I am to point out the faults of others, I bear my own too.
I won't justify them.
No, I don't have to scoot over,  but I will.
And I will also let the waitress keep her two cents.


This city has bared it's teeth a time or two, and it has not gone unnoticed.
But according to Jamie, this is natural. Some creatures bite.
A city built to prosper will be abrasive.
But if I stand back, if I expect what is coming.
I will not be devoured by it.
I may even gain a kind of understanding for it.


For the many cultures, for the interns who bus my table when they're not engulfed in what's changing the world.
For the spoken word poets, who drop a line of tribute to Langston Hughes.
For the future Martin Luther Kings and Mother Teresas who are surely around me.
For the man or woman being Jesus to the forgotten and dejected in this urban wasteland of loneliness.


It is a tangible presence, the loneliness here.
That is why I stand back, why I push away.
Because sometimes it threatens me too.