Reluctant Hero

(For Bill Cohen)

I’m a reluctant hero, but please don’t ask why.
I do not deserve whatever accolades you may feel like bestowing upon me. Give them to someone who actually looks good wearing medals and being led around like a prized poodle.
I’m just a poet nothing more and a whole lot less. When it comes time for dinner, I’ll be the first one sitting at the table and the last one to get up before stretching and going to bed.

I’m a reluctant bank robber, but please don’t ask why.
It was never about amassing wealth or scaring people by pointing a gun at them. I think it has more to do with the thrill of doing something out of the ordinary, even though robbing banks seems to be becoming more of an everyday happening with each passing day.
Examine your own needs. Do it selflessly and selfishly. Do it with unmitigated abandon, and do it while wearing a blindfold and smoking a cigarette. You are a flawed human specimen, and when held up to the light, you are also a reluctant hero with countermeasures and counter offers making up for lost time and lost wages.

I stood up too fast, and from an insufficient amount of oxygen to the brain, I nearly fainted.
Poetry is the IV drip I find necessary to keep me hydrated and full of good vibrations. It’s most certainly not a cure all, but it’s also far from snake oil as I discover myself for the first time in a very long time receptive to going outside and feeling the sun on my pasty skin.
I’m channeling a different kind of development having far more to do with internal fluctuations than anything that can be looked at under a microscope.

I waited in the waiting room for you to come out knowing full well you had more than likely slipped out a back door because our relationship had been on the skids for quite some time. We had become reluctant heroes to our inability to express why it was we felt so lifeless and had no get up and go. Train yourself to become an assassin, and break on through to the other side because only then will you have any chance at reconciling with your inner self. I’m not talking about passing away, but instead about living through the reconnecting with all of your most reluctant of senses.

Charles Cicirella
10/5/14