The Rooster of Carriage Drive
As a college student I studied poverty—it consumed me.
Nearing the end to a month before the check came in, I often walked miles foregoing the bus
and cut my peanut butter sandwich to a single piece of bread, spaghetti with tomato paste. I wanted to understand the causes of need, as if by knowing, I could help chase them, a ghost hunter who identified a squeak as the wind soughing through a hole in the wood near the eaves, or the voice feedback in the speakers from the coupling of the AM radio next door with the copper wiring in the walls, only listening for what made people poor.
As students, we said “cure,” as if poverty were an infection and we could eradicate it with the right vaccination, a deforming economic polio we could conquer with a disciplined science of speech.
I lived on a street with fixed incomes, the retired, the disabled, the widowed, in cookie-cutter apartments that resembled cubicles, IBM windows like holes in a punch card. I drank tea like the Russian anarchists all night as I studied, so buzzed by caffeine that I shook, so wild by morning with my beard rustled by my hands for hours and my eyes socked by lack of sleep I looked like those tsarist bombers. Every dawn I entered hungry and zealous.
One morning my landlord old lady Vovakovic called me to come over, gave me a morning bun, a pastry with frosting and raisins, called me a poor, poor baby. No girlfriend, no food, I was all appetite to her. I ate the bun with ravenous intent, apologized for my worn shoes and worn jeans and the second-hand jacket a size too large, and with the tea-borne caffeine both amplifying and distorting my intelligence, had the epiphany that I would study myself, my own poverty, its cause, felt the sugar surge into mindless elation, and stored one more pastry in my jacket pocket.
I walked backwards for a block toward school yelling thanks to Mrs. Vovakovic and crowing Good Morning to all my neighbors in their sleepy coops, waving madly, the rooster of Carriage Drive waking everyone with his strutting cry. I had become rich, if only for a moment.
Jeff Burt lives in California with his wife. He has contributed to Blueword, Lowestoft Chronicles, Opendoor Poetry Magazine, Green Lantern Literary, and Gold Man Review. jeffburtmth@twitter.com