He’s the man you walk by when you’re late for work. He sits outside the train station; a part of the scenery, a part of routine. You barely even spare him a glance, too used to his presence to bother that slightest part of energy. But even when you were new to this area, even when you had never so much as seen him, you barely looked at him. You, in your Armani suits, you hurry past the man sitting on that milk crate. Don’t make eye contact, you don’t know what might happen. But every so often, even if by the gods you wish otherwise, you can’t help but accidentally look. And it’s when you look that you’re surprised. His beard isn’t long and scraggly, he doesn’t smell like urine, he doesn’t have an emaciated dog and a shopping trolley; no tattered sleeping bag under his arm. There’s no alcohol to be seen, no suspicious white powder, no. He sits there, in comfortable jeans and a simple tshirt. He’s unassuming, well dressed, clean. And he sits there with a cardboard sign resting on his knees. He has a stack of manuscripts on the floor beside him; prisitine, white, clean. You look closer, drawn in by everything strange about this scene. And while he looks at you, pityingly, you with your Armani suit and disintegrating marriage and fucked-up secretary, you read his cardboard sign and you see:
words for free; dream a little today.
