Karl Sherlock

Telegraph & Bancroft, he’s standing in mid morning, scorched and
applauding
                  at nothing. And you?
                                                 Drowning in coffee and
a scrawny book of poems you’ll donate to the barista before leaving:
local author, three bucks
                                       & change, signed too,
                                                                         but chocked with &’s
and lower case “i”s to hide the self-aggrandizements in plain sight.
Besides, your man’s still
                                      out there clapping
                                                                   with neurodivergent joy,
and maybe at first, you glanced up at him to earn the right
to look away from his
                                    cluttered, incoherent beard;
                                                                                    his too plaid
everything; his wide red trainers, shoelace untied for any who will
bother to look.
                       Yet, cheese-and-crackers,
                                                                 he owns you for eight
and a half minutes, smashing the atoms between his hands
until the primary colors
                                     in the kiosk postcards
                                                                        bend to his gravity;
and the clamoring jackhammers, next street over, spirograph
the meniscus of your coffee;
                                             and he catches you
                                                                            parsing his
slapdash prosody, from context to subtext, like a small nation
of big,
            just this intersection in between,
                                                                and his sunburnt hands
daring you, Go on, then. Clap till it hurts. And you, ready to
dare him back, with
                                Go on then, yourself.
                                                             Take a gentle bow.

A disabled, queer writer, Karl Sherlock’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in After Happy Hour, Broken Lens, Cathexis North West, Lime Hawk, Mollyhouse, RockPaperPoem, Stone Boat, Science Write Now, Streetlight, Wordgathering, and others, as well as in anthologies such as New Feathers and The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet: A Disabled and Neurodivergent Anthology. He is also a Sundress 2014 “Best of the Net” finalist for his memoir about marrying a conversion therapy torture survivor. A professor of English in El Cajon, California, he teaches distance education poetry workshops and writing courses from his home, where he is also a round-the-clock caregiver to his physically and medically disabled husband, Max.