Run Ahead of Me: December 2010

Though it is hard to see, (because the picture is blurry),
This is the portrait of a man who is inordinately furry.

You can’t see much more than the tip of his nose,
But that’s fine ‘cause in this photo he’s wearing no clothes.

He grew up in the city in a family of lawyers,
In houses and vacation homes with house maids and foyers.

And he grew up believing in argumentation,
And in conducting oneself in accord with one’s station.

But as he grew older he began to resent,
That he was allowed to say little about what he wore or where he went.

So during a stint in a boarding school out in Ventura,
He began to rethink all the things he’d been sure of.

He was thinking a thought that was long and quite subtle,
And then he began thinking his mother’s rebuttal.

And then, realizing he’d been trained much too well,
He snuck out at night and hopped a bus for Carmel.

Out on the cliffs with all that was wild,
He felt he’d been squelched since he was a child.

Forced to be shorn and forced to be svelte--
None of this matched his true inner self.

So discarding everything he’d been taught (and not learned)
And all the things that he’d been given (but had not earned),

He emptied his mind and took off his clothes,
(As the indecent exposure charge on the arrest report shows).

And that was the start of his extended flirtation
With radical thinking and self-exploration.

He ditched all his schooling and refused to go home,
He tried to live in a hole in the woods like a gnome.

He did without heat, clothes and food for a day,
Then he decided he’d better find some other way.

He felt he could deal with a job selling fruit,
Because it was close to nature and his boss was hirsute.

In his thinking, a job was not a capitulation,
But a very small concession to civilization.

In most things he wanted to be different from his folks
But he did not want to fail and be the butt of their jokes.

So he had to earn money, at least to get by,
Until food and housing start to fall from the sky.

The produce stand owner thought the kid was a freak
But he showed up on time and worked hard all week.

He made some new friends and got along with others
And made his own clothes out of stuff found in dumpseters.

One of his tenets was that it was a sin
To cut off whatever grew out of one’s skin.

He’d say, “Like the hair of the dog or the mane of a horse,
It is best to let things take their natural course!”

So, though his friends and co-workers found it all quite peculiar,
He just got furry and then he got furrier.

And being half Jewish with liberal political sympathies,
He soon had hair out to his extremities.

Soon he tripped on his beard and his hair concealed all emotion.
The wind caught his afro and blew him out to the ocean.

The Coast Guard found him entwined in the kelp,
Fending off otters and yelling for help.

Once safe on shore, shivering in the back of a squad car,
He admitted, “Even the best thoughts can be taken too far.”

What goes for the best, goes even more for the worst,
But if you’ve been similarly dumb, rest assured, you ain’t the first.

Now he’s a store manager, and wears a low fade,
And has traded self-abnegation for a desire to get laid.

Run Ahead of Me