—December 23, 2022

Four o’clock and it’s
freezing cold outside today
five degrees will be

the overnight high
with wind chill thirty below.
So nice to be warm

and dry inside here
hope the city’s street people
survive the deep freeze.

A class among us—
we call them the unhoused, not
because we are kind

but because our soft
spot for the billionaire class 
is vaguely disturbed

that some might resist
offer of warmth on a night
like this one coming.
                        

His family jokingly
suggested he might play
his fiddle outside the Essex 
on the loop one evening
returning from dinner in the
pleasant haze of their love. 
He took them up on it, young 
eight-year-old, call him
Johnny, Johnny Generic for
a boy small enough to play
his three-quarter size cello
sitting outside next morning
in the early chill, warming up
his fingers with the prelude
to Bach’s first unaccompanied
suite for the instrument, in his 
hands seeming full-size, case
open in front of him already 
filling with passersby’s pocket
change he had declared he’d
spend to buy video games; and if
his periwigged master had been
able to hear over the hoot 
of his celestial diapason, perhaps
he would have smiled at yet one more
Johnny to queue up and add to the ten 
survived— 

but hey, who’s counting?