It’s hard to look people in the eye when
your hand and foot shackles drag you
down but you see plenty on the scuffed
linoleum of the corridors checked in
schoolroom patterns of light and
dark not white or blue anymore because
nothing here is the way it started but is
worn by the passing of the prison chanclas
on your feet and the disguised running
shoes of the dragon-slaying public defender
who just starting tilting at dragons
and hasn’t yet found the place to press the
spear but the heavy cushioned shoes of
the court sheriff reflects one surprise
of kindness as he kindly, kindly!
helps you through the bars and
doors of a day that is only
erosion
how does a sheriff do that? but still
your eyes fall into the deep pools
worn in the marble steps wondering
how many scuffs does it take to curve
the marble and you imagine standing
there for a year endlessly twisting
on the cold stone sinking slowly
as you watch your feet and
then your legs
grind away
Backstory
I frequently visited an office in downtown LA, and I’d regularly walk to Homeboy Industries for lunch. An amazing LA non-profit, it was started by Father Greg Boyle to provide a lifeline to people caught up in the LA gangs. They run a café at their downtown LA office that I visited whenever I could. On the walk, I’d pass by the large homeless encampment. It’s a journey that never failed to throw me into a mood of contemplation. When I was 13 I lived near the Boyles’ house in Los Angeles, and had a clear memory of playing with Greg and a couple of his brothers…another story.
In 2002, my thoughts came to a head. I was moved to write about the people living on the street, and their situation. But getting a handle on how to approach it was elusive. I thought about it for months, with no progress. I took a white water rafting trip in Idaho, and for much of it my mind was in homeless encampments in LA. Each time I worked on it, I felt it in my body; my head and spirit were dragged down. I found myself looking at the floor. At my feet. At my shoes.
My mind wandered to the Twilight Zone show Dead Man’s Shoes. I contemplated a long complex poem that moved through the encampment, focused only on different shoes. It felt like carrying the metaphor that long would become precious. I also didn’t know enough, personally, to write that poem. But the thought of being dragged down remained. I also began thinking about the buildings around the encampments; the jails and courthouses.
I’ve always been fascinated by worn stone steps. In Jerusalem, the hollows in the Southern Steps at the Temple Mount were mesmerizing. You find the worn steps throughout Europe and the East Coast of the United States. Even in the old Los Angeles downtown buildings, they are there, if you feel for them. In most places the stone buildings are churches and government buildings. Courthouses. Courthouses, a stone’s throw from the encampments. Courthouses, through which many of the homeless people have traveled. My poem had shifted focus.
On a parallel track, I had also been working on the concept of erosion as a metaphor for aging. But erosion was a perfect addition to this poem, so I brought that in. I could feel myself getting close. I began thinking about the various people in the courtroom and what shoes they would be wearing. The prisoner. The young public defender. An older sheriff on his last assignment before retiring, someone who had seen it all and had come full circle on crime and punishment. One morning on a walk, I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought about the judge. “The Judge wore pumps” exploded in my brain. I hurried home and wrote the poem, quickly, before I lost it.
The final poem came largely in one cathartic sitting. When I was done, however, I was stunned that the Judge hadn’t made it to the page. I instantly realized I had a title.
On my first pass on a poem, I tend to write with “enjambment.” This is where the line breaks interrupt the natural flow of the words. It’s just how my mind works with words, and it forces the reader to pay attention, to think bit more about what is being said. I edited the form and line breaks extensively. I tried starting it from one long line that gradually shortened to one final word, as a concrete metaphor of erosion on the page. I tried having it shorten twice. I played with centered alignment. These all worked in theory, but distracted from the poem itself. I tried natural line breaks, but it flowed too gently. The poem needed a stream of consciousness to propel it forward. After all this contortion, I settled on the form you see above. It was almost identical to the very first version. Editing. Love it. Hate it.
The presentation Sonny Lira gave this poem in the stage play was simple yet powerful. Carver Folkes and Aidan John gave the words the weight they required, elegantly handing the lines off to each other.