he called himself v sharp razor
but most people said the dancing man
and he cut himself
a fine figure
sometimes private school kids called alexander
or –dra
would strangle the necks of their violins
in the cat-and-fiddle arcade and
once I saw a boy juggling balls and
a girl with no guitar sang greensleeves
to the nth degree
but the dancing man busked his strangeness
like a cast-off five-stringed thing
his weirdness was his instrument
strung up tight
and tuned to a pitching fork
he played his alienation
like a maestro
and how the people loved
the way he practised the scales
of his quaint despair
just ask the great federico about otherness
and he’ll agree:
it’s so much more crowd-pleasing
with a soundtrack
but now the dancing man has danced himself safe
and the twisted pegs of his strings have come unsprung
and I always thought how coy the spanish are
to use the same verb for to touch for to play
to play the strings of your aloneness to touch them
the dancing man fondled the catgut of his strangeness
and we all stood by
outside a place called sanity
grinning
and absently tapping our leather-shod feet
