my blues proxy

some skinny kid slumped on a sidewalk's weathered bench, gray to match the sky's usual mood but not today. shaggy inside his baggy black sweatpants & billowing white tshirt cradling a black bagged guitar between his knees as one pale slender arm lazily hoists a harmonica to his pursed lips. i hear him before i see him as i approach the bus stop beside the school of rock. i am tired today & have been all week, but it's not the harmonica that startles me, it's the pang in the moan of his bluesy belting, the tang in his hurtful shout, punctuated by perfunctory hoots of harmonica. i sit down on the gray bench inside the transparent shelter, my posture perfected from sitting on a cushion all afternoon, daylight stolen to search inside my cave. i feel his defiantly poisonous glare on my shoulder and refuse to meet its dark eyed dare as i look past him for a bus that refuses to arrive. trapped inside his practiced howl, i sit there and watch all the people who pass, swiveling their twice startled heads: first by the sound of someone singing & singing really well and then again when they finally locate that source of song and realize it's just some skinny little kid who has perfected the soul of misery.