Those clothes

by L. Stewart Marsden

Those clothes the old man wore
were ragged and dirty
and smelled of sweat,
ill-matched, out-of-fashion, passé
and yet
he bore them well, as a proud man might,
in spite of the negative auras around him,
where others avoided his spaces and more
for fear of catching a rare and incurable,
like poverty, odor or bad breath or worse –
who — though not being begged — dug out of their purse
a dollar or more to avoid the man’s curse.

Copyright © by Lawrence S. Marsden, 18 June, 2014