The Tramp Poem

This man in dark glasses was walking on a
downward sloping sidewalk towards me and I was
sitting on this old bench. And my heart
jumped with the staggering possibility that he
was blind—I don’t believe he was—but he
was a lean man and was wearing a blue
plaid shirt. I guess I was just terribly taken
with him—as a character and we were in a
pleasant little town where I felt like a foreigner.
And as he approached he took a puff from
a fat cigar and I believe that really impressed
me or struck me or something and as he
passed my bench on the narrow sidewalk and
FOX news drifted out of a pizza shop and
Nina Simone sang a song in my mind it occurred
to me that the smell of that cigar smoke would
blow across me in a moment or so and I
waited for it and noticed the bald spot on
the top of his head and feared for a second that
the smell would not reach me after all but then,
as it happened—it did, with the wind and
it was very thick and divine and foreign (like
myself) and then my lip practically bled from
being bitten.