STRANGER

Oooh, oooh, dangerous stranger—traitorous, laborious, even vaporous. What to do? Should I show aglow with angst at the foreign advance? Should I curl into a ball if English is not on call? I should know something besides comment allez-vous or cómo estás before I grow aghast that people appear trashed, out of kilter in an egregious social filter. Oh, should I fear a heave-ho from my primal post as tojo of white mojo? Fear a stall in my where-with-all? The effort exhausts, keeping up the frost. Play the world like an aired, bared, and scared funhouse ride where faces pop from the dark to frighten animosity, squeezing generosity. It can get worse and wends a hearse if a line’s traversed. Chanted at night with the torches; in the eyes lies dredged from evermore. Hot yak as flack succors a stupor bilious and gone asunder from Odysseus. The Greek welcomes the unknown traveler at the gate. Hospitality construed virtue and honor as morality, a modality now a fatality. Why bother? Old concepts tossed when the Other went blooey, cluster bombed by resentment stewed hooey, leaving toxic grudge in the sludge of no can budge from this fence or stay the grunting bile in the fog of nonsense? If curious, such drivel is spurious, lift the glutenous butt; find in your seed the unknown, the tumble into humble, a peep into the steep and stony, say amen to what skunks the lunk dishing bunk. It’s simple combustion that strangers in danger from afar sans cars, in a flood, cross the horn of desperation. How dare they come bleating and weedy for our charity?

Let’s move closer to home, Jerome. There, the one you love, and the versa with no vice is smooth as fudge with a dash of salt, and a surprise within that makes times for cries in your eyes, or maybe a nut with a shell but delicious when shed, flaunts your want of the punch in its crunch. Not strangers, here are intimates, shared, paired, and declared. You have more than spilled your creamy center, pursuing the billed thrill of mine and yours for now and onward; time is a spine, give it no mind. But what if Jack or Jill hikes over the hill and goes rogue in the demimonde? When known, will stoke a revoke of thine so fine and wobble your combine. Comes a chill in the mundane universe that you are in daily converse because a spark who played the ukulele, under the innermost id, hid. A border crossed, the familiar strange, self-deportation on the tongue shatters the whee of free when you were young. Between you and me, liberty has some fine print where behind the eyes there can be lies.

A commingling of strangers in our midst takes on a gist. The not too bright can only distinguish between those in the light and the dark, Clark. They are next to us, marooned in a gloom with no room to bloom. As if in an eclipse, the recognizable Joe or June, holy cow, recedes behind a mass dense as the moon, invisible—now. You want a why to justify the ravaged sky—many rush to abate and shut the gate, calling it fate. Alien is as stranger does, double trouble when fear’s fury turns culpable in hope’s defeat of our once-given promise as sweet, the land of milk and honey. Unexplained and unexpectedly, they are an intruder in bold. Your balance with malice turns cold. See a country’s grace tossed away, a blight by a hard hand, no magic, full tragic. Between now and then removed—our love stained, our help stayed, joy became lead, and memory’s connections fled. Found alone, left bereft at a dead end, where seeking the one who will not fail the will to comprehend.

Attend, dear reader; can we host within a stranger who, from a sum of trespasses, emerges to be seen? Their appearance wants not for something extra, beyond reason or heart. When comes the torn and weary voyager, will we hold her close? Here are chances for the balm of recognition to transform a stranger into a person in want of the courage of love’s admission. Failing that, we risk being a stranger to ourselves.