Poem-A-Day: Day 261

Old Man and the Sea of Faces

I’m not usually moved by the kindness of strangers,
because everyone is either a stranger to me,
or stranger than I can perceive them,
so their motives seemed skewed,
and I do my best to eschew their movements,
their attempts to interact with my life.
I find the strangers to be off,
some disavowed concept
that I can’t seem to shake from my memory.
But whatever happens, they’re there,
and they hover around me
like terrible ghosts.
I see their eyes penetrating my callous face,
trying to discover some hidden motive,
but my only motive is ignorance,
so that I may be ignored.
It has worked for years,
until today, when an old man,
a stranger, decided to give me a penny.
He told me that now we’ll both have good luck.