The Passersby

You see them everywhere,
the dazed and disbelieving passersby,
faces full of the things they’ve seen,
disillusioned, ashen, torn between
rage at having truth assault their eye
and dumb wonder at the luck of being there.

Innocent passersby,
with no love of seeing or being seen,
folk who live in the thin zone between
the actual and that which meets the eye,
things dreamt and things really there.
Decent citizens: they’re everywhere.

Maybe it’s death they’ve seen,
maybe the desperate gunman caught between
the cops and the proprietor’s dead eye,
or maybe they saw that tangled form there
hit, spread its humors everywhere.
They’ll never be the same, the passersby.

Maybe it’s love between
two perfect strangers that compels their eye
to follow strolling couples here and there;
why else would we meet them everywhere?
There’s no escaping them, the passersby,
and they remember everything they’ve seen.

Maybe another eye
to faithfully reflect them standing there
is what they search for everywhere,
some connection. Or do the passersby
simply collect the incidents they’ve seen,
bright pages to press their days between?

They won’t always be there:
things will go unnoticed everywhere.
They tend to disappear, the passersby,
taking with them all the things they’ve seen,
love and death and everything between,
the traces of ourselves still in their eye.