he was standing on the curb
a bearded man with a wool cardigan
a striped one, made for the winter
by strange hands and thrown away for him
to find it between pizza boxes in an alley.
now I know he was a beggar, but
at that time, when I was four,
he looked like a funny old man;
he blew the smoke from his cigarrette in the night air
and he glanced at me
as my family got inside the ice cream shop -
where the ice cream people are, you know.
I had fruit salad in a goblet
and laughed at my father's silly panama hat
and imagined what I'd be when I grew old.
my mother offered me her hand and we went to the car;
I kneeled in the backseat, staring through the rear view window
I saw the alluring lights of the city
and the leather-dressed people standing in front of bars
and the funny old man lying in a pool of tomato juice
in the same curb I saw him just before;
my sister yelled something I don't remember
and started crying as my father called the police.
I sat on the backseat covering my eyes with my hands
and hoped that those deafening sounds would stop
and felt so awkward and so thoughtful
for not understanding that completely.
today, I think about the funny old man
dressed in striped clothes lying in that curb
and realise that that was not tomato juice,
but the key to the understanding of my mind,
the only thing that could make a four-yeard-old kid
wonder about the death, simple as it is,
and about the things that made someone
stick a knife in a beggar's belly.
I've got a notebook filled with ideas for tales and poems concerning some girls I've been in love with, meaningful nonsense dreams I've had and some random thoughts that wander through my mind, most of which have no sense or meaning at all. One of these random thoughts was about a striped man. I remember when I wrote it in the back of a piece of paper used to organize the subjects I had to study, and it had no apparent reason to be written. I simply wrote it.
Yesterday, I was reading some texts I wrote and laughing at my silly poems when I found a little list of disconnected ideas, whose most curious one was that saying "the striped man", wrote using my father's old inkstand. I thought about it and found nothing at all, so I just kept reading other things. Later, when I went to bed, I had a misterious dream about the situation the poem portrays. When I called my mother this morning, she said this actually happened and told me the whole story.
The beggar was an old man, seventy something years old, and lived in the streets of the town where I live since I've been born. On that night, he was stabbed to death in the belly by some strange wanderer who was never found. Who would say my unconscious could surprise me this much?
