Would that we’d learn
before we feed the bugs.
It’s a long, long road between Novembers
with an infinite number of ways
for one to lose their course
and that’s what happened to the travel-weary man
when looking for a place to lay his head;
a place he might belong.
He thought a certain tavern looked real nice
so he asked about a vacant room,
but the first signs of trouble were already present.
See, as a white cisgender male
with a cross hanging from his neck,
he looked like the villain of too many stories,
so the tavern said we have no place for you here.
The man knows not to question it
for singular concerns from times before
had only gotten him labeled with new -phobias.
The slightest pushback, or reservation,
somehow morphed him into a bigot,
a mansplainer or misogynist.
But if you knew the heart of this particular man
you’d find nothing but love amidst this world
constantly letting him down,
along with some remnants of ignorance
he’s slowly been chipping away at
like a fiercely dedicated sculptor
with heavy, heavy arms
wielding a chisel cracking at the base.
For at some point, he recognized
that the wrong voices had molded him early in life,
that there were many, many different kinds of people
all worthy of dignity and every human respect,
that it was time to embark on a mission
he believes everyone should prioritize:
to render mute the echoes that form us.
Except to succeed, you eventually need a place to go
but since the tavern keepers only accepted perfect forms
(and his didn’t yet exist)
the world he was desperate to belong in
refused to be any kind of welcoming.
Tavern after tavern after tavern stayed closed
saying he still needed to fix this and that about himself
or blaming him for sins
committed only by people who looked like him,
that people like him will always be an obstacle to the ideal world.
So it was back out onto the road
to continue the search for some kind of home.
And if any of these people
who think (mostly correctly, but with significant gaps)
they have the moral high ground
had shared some of their kindness with this tired, tired man,
his story might have ended very different.
Because that’s when life began to rain,
and I know when I’m caught under downpouring clouds
any kind of shelter I claim will suffice.
Thus, the tavern on the edge of society
displaying boarded-up windows
and a sign suspended on it’s only unbroken string.
Inside, it smelled of gunpowder, beer,
wastebins unchanged, and slightly spoiled meat,
but they told the traveler
there’s always room for your kind here.
They showed him a room
with peeling wallpaper and mold in the corners
completed with an old and tattered mattress
covered in spots
to which the travel-weary man threw himself
without hesitation,
fully received to have finally been accepted by something,
falling asleep almost immediately.
It was only then,
in what should be a surprise to no one,
that something began to bite him.
