Outsiders

Rain on stone
Drips from sills,
Floods the gutters,
Drains away.

The empty streets are always empty.
Faces reflect in windows; rain falls anyway.

All but invisible, the corner boys congregate
To hear the sermon drizzle preaches,
Which dreary gospel promises nothing,
Not one solitary thing.

Nothing to be seen here.

Cars, in passing, spit the puddles’ drench
Over pavement and façades; wipers flick
The same spittle sideways to the rain.

Empty but for traffic, its snake’s-hiss
Barely audible in the downpour,
The street glistens with neon dusk;
Light seeps from windows where blinds,
Still drawn back, let interior yellow shine out
Into the gathering dark.

Ill-assorted faces leer in shadows,
Squint from alleys, in the back-yard gloom,
They belong to no-one, inhabit nowhere, unnamed,
Figures with features blurred to blankness.

These, the unrecognized, live among us,
Rank outsiders with hands tucked into armpits
Or stuffed in pockets against the nighttime chill,
Casually inviting a sidelong glance.

Some doors open inwards; in the shops

Or bar-rooms, decent, proper people come and go;

Money changes hands with the briefest of touches,

Lips speak or eyes meet, coins cross palms,

Transactions, the signs and signatures of love,

A watchful, secretive love.
Outsiders in the rain, remain outside,
Louche, callow-featured, unlike.

Of us, but not us,
The outsiders are still waiting
To be washed clean by weather
To be acceptable in our sight
As if difference could be rinsed
In the gutters of commonplace streets,
Waiting for a welcome, for a doorway
To lead them home.

© BH, 2016

---

So it dawns. No-one is anyone. There’s a competition to belonging and we go on struggling with ourselves to make ourselves fit, to make ourselves succeed. When you’re on the inside belonging seems like a birthright. Unconsciously we pull up the ladder behind us. Can’t be room for everyone, we think. Then, above us we see the ladder pulling out of sight. No-one is anyone. 

There comes a point when the whole sorry sham is evident. We are all looking for that doorway. Those who think they have found it sometimes learn there is more than one. Some learn that doorways are where you sleep. Some learn the secret. Doorways have doors and doors have keys. Doors are sometimes locked to keep the outsiders out. Can’t be room for everyone, they think. 

The image is based on Howard Becker's Outsiders - Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. I remember the book from those heady days when sociology seemed to provide insights. I added some faces I found plus a bleakly urban rainscape to fit our times of structural anomie. If you look very closely, you might just see that I'm there too.

I wrote Doors and Ways in 2019 as a kind of update…