very thinly and comically designed

Rappin’ with this dude named Ty from Soho;

he’s an artist,

a painter,

an observer of the human condition and

other pretentious phases and phrases.

He listens to Coltrane by the light

of a black light as he slaps multicultural

swaths of color and texture across his life’s

canvas and smokes a doobie the size of a

stogie and creates angry bitter satire,

ironic and sardonic images designed to

mask his psychopathic preoccupations.

I like to engage Ty in discourses on

politics and sociology, religion and philosophy,

because his rejoinders are so hip and cryptic,

his delivery so razor-sharp,

his thoughts so intuitive and insightful,

I end up questioning everything i believe in.

I ask him if he believes in god, he says,

“If he believes in me,”

which on the surface seems so facile,

so cheeky,

so Dylanesque.

But as I reflect further

on this statement and delve

deeper into its content,

I sense a certain sadness and poignancy,

longing and desire as well as a hint of hopelessness and despair.

When I challenge his logic,

he recoils and smiles sheepishly,

as if I have caught him in a lie.

He shrugs and avoids my eyes and

begins humming a Pink Floyd tune,

the one about feeling comfortably numb,

and immediately bursts into mirthful laughter,

wondering if I am “experienced like Jimi…”

I pause and inhale his breath and

wonder when he will come out

of his depression.

 “Life is so non-linear and haphazard and

random and yet,”

he swallows and chokes simultaneously,

but remains steadfast in his ability

to finish the thought.

“And yet there’s such a pattern,

a coherence,

almost an anal/oral quality to it all,

I almost have to believe in something

larger than myself.”

This is the closest I have ever heard him

come to acknowledgment and acceptance.

He has lived half his life quoting

Camus and Sartre and Marx and Heidegger and

prides himself on his non-beliefs in everything from

a higher being to the American dream and is practically

sadistic in his treatment of those who are loyal and devout,

idealistic and patriotic,

in love and matrimony;

the two are always mutually exclusive to him.

For the first time, I feel his existential foundation

beginning to crack.

However, my respect for his sensibility and

my compassion for his failures as a man precludes me

from destroying the structure he has so diligently

tried to construct,

to code or not to code, that is the question.

And so, we sit together

in a comfortable silence,

complacent and fat,

lonely and at peace,

wondering why the conversation lags and

why do we allow confrontations to go unchallenged?