Poem by Sebastian Matthews

Improvise  
 
I like to sit in this bistro’s back room—a little art gallery—and drink a beer as I read a book or jot notes down on my pad. Usually it’s just me back here. I open the door to let breeze in, play jazz quietly on my phone. Today B. joins me; he plops down in a nearby chair and lets me buy him a beer. He’s talkative, reflecting on his childhood. “I was a crack baby,” he tells me. “That’s why I walk like this.” He points to his legs. “I tell ya, growing up the way I did in Chicago, it teaches you things.” I’m not sure B. will talk to me in this manner again. “Like what?” He thinks on it a while, sipping down his beer. “That you need to always work hard. And when there’s no work, you improvise.” I nod my agreement. “That’s the word,” he says. “Improvise.” A man walks past, across the street, stumbling and lurching, shouting out to no one. “It’s too early,” B. comments. “For that boy to be cracked out.” I assume the man is drunk, but looking closer, he seems haunted by ghosts. “I’m not going out there and play Superman,” he says. “That don’t get you anything but trouble.” Later, as I get ready to head out, B. tells me, now that we’ve talked: “We have a thing, you know. We can sit down now and talk to one another.” He takes off his bright yellow cap and rubs his cross-cropped head. “Like adults.”

Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press. A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, a memoir in poems, will come out from Red Hen in 2017. Along with Stanley Plumly, Matthews is the co-editor of three volumes: The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews of William Matthews (University of Michigan Press), Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews (Houghton Mifflin), a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews (Red Hen Press) His latest project includes a collage novel, the Life & Times of American Crow. 

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