The power of invisibility

When he was a boy he thought invisibility would be a stupid superpower

Back then all he wanted was to be noticed

Now, as an adult he feels too seen

Too obvious

As if everyone can smell his loneliness

He hates the way they look at him—

He wishes he could blend in

So he draws in on himself

Tries shrink down

Tries to fade

From their piercing glances

From their shaking heads

From their judgments

But people look right at him and they suck their teeth and roll their eyes

And sometimes they even say:

That he’s a bum

That he’s a loser

That he should get a fucking job

That he should take a fucking shower

But he can hear more than they say

He can hear between their words, when they glare in his direction and speak so loudly to their friends:

He might as well die

Times like these, lonely times like these,

He knows that if he were to expire,

There, seated on the curb,

Or there, leaned against the brick of a high rise

Or there, curled up on a rattling subway seat

If he were to die among them, they wouldn’t mourn

Nobody is left to the world, who can care about him

The people who see him, who suck their teeth and pass their judgments, they don’t even know he exists!

Not really.

All they know is: how he looks

ugly, strange, unclean

He feels their eyes on him, but when he tries to meet their eyes

They flit away,

All to deny him the basic decency of a human gaze

And when he hangs his head and looks down at his feet

He feels their eyes again: glaring, condemning, judging

So he begins to openly cry

On some level they still know he is there, but his tears are a shield

He uses them to blur out the world entire,

And the judges become like him— shadows and shimmers

On the peripheries

They cease to matter, their condemnation rolls down his cheeks and off his shoulders

And he sticks out all the sorer, sobbing there on the cold, dirty, concrete

But everyone who passes gives him a wider berth

Nobody asks if he is okay.

They give him a respectful (no, a terrified) distance

They fear that whatever he has— and all he lacks— might be catching

They are so afraid of his tears, that when they pass him by,

They now hold their tongues

And they pretend they do not see him at all

And so, he washes away the sounds of their scorn

***

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Author’s note:

A quick little poem about the pained body language that demonstrates the social disconnect between the crowd and the outsider.

Here, the outsider is a homeless man, ignored so plainly that the people looking away might as well be holding neon signs.

This theme is a callback to one of the first things I ever wrote on vocal: