Give Us This Day
- Bryan Franco
- May 5
- 1 min read
by Bryan Franco
He was warned the city would eat him alive,
chew him up, and spit him out.
He savored the city and digested
every experience it offered:
sweet, bitter, beautiful, ugly.
Honking horns and sirens
sung him to sleep.
The silence outside his childhood bedroom window
riddled his visits home with insomnia.
He found horizons in the asphalt and shadows
that didn’t exist in The Gulf of Mexico.
He had become a glutton for all
the cul-de-sac had denied him.
He delighted in the bitter
in a naively sweet way.
He realized it was okay
to talk to strangers.
He enjoyed the company of
the waving homeless man
who slept on the bench near
the East River jogging path just past
the Randall’s Island walking bridge.
They never conversed.
Never shook hands.
Never exchanged names.
Yet each served a purpose
for the others existence:
they gave each other each day
a little piece of daily bread.
One waved.
The other waved back.
The sweet sound of dawn was
the theme song to their conversations:
a collaboration by two long lost brothers
who drank their coffee black.
That one time they had breakfast together,
they sat at the counter of The Silver Star Diner
downing cups of black coffee and chewing
on a city neither could ever spit out.
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