Stranger

I talked to a stranger last Monday someone who crossed my path that day someone who I may have known before though in a different place he may have had a different name, different face but he had the same sad eyes, the same smell of cheap stale wine dressed in dirty ragged clothes worn by time and drudgery there in the shadows of so many, many years before long nights when time passed more slowly and mornings dawning was oh so slow to come I had met him there along the railroad lines those ribbons of steel leading on to who knows where I have met him in the back alleys of any given town lying there in the shadows huddled against life’s miseries a mind awash with dreadful distant memories of life’s failures and horrors; those remnants of some foreign war memories that leave him restless; adrift; unable to settle with a need to constantly keep moving on his mind now numbed by drugs or drink that at times leaves him sprawled against some darkened door I may have known him then; way back before this time You may also have known him then