Keep his distance (poem)

Keep his distance

He is much closer now to his condemners

Manners, if good social manners

would stop the driver of a van

He will sit, monitor this scene through a dirty screen

A wireless device at rest near his resting hand

Hand that touches no lover’s knee

She in the seat beside him

(Where to eat? What to see?

I treasure you, my Normal. My Pass. My Key.)

He could have bought a lover, if everyone winks these days

if no love be in it, if arsonist derision is the way     now

Of the era

He would not be The Man at Odds

even his congressman hates, and wants to kill

His brain would not, mind fallen numb

Lock onto pretty faces, girls with their mothers

Spot unearned cockiness in the male young

The thumb to answer this bred-in impetus

Sirens scream

His place of parting marked by a crater

As like an asteroid he’d hit

And they want to mock this, top it, bungee an inch or two

Farther

His death toll become a bar to vault

Keep his distance

Aground

(2021, Stephanie Foster)