When I first learned
that I was to be the Footman,
forever holding the coat open
for the next one to wear, I was afraid.
I only snickered to cover the air
hissing through my rattling teeth.

It’s been a long time
since then. Since then
I’ve held so many coats, sometimes
several thousand coats at once, sometimes
one at a time, standing in bedrooms
before desperate men clutching
their sharp little heads, waiting on curbs
for tender children to step into traffic,
hovering in hospital corridors, avoiding
the fists of angry husbands as they beat
their wives into my arms.

I have almost
stopped talking altogether, even when I am
ready to say something good and true, because really,
what would it matter? I am
unremarkable in the scheme of things, commonplace,
not worthy of being heard
beyond “your coat sir…your coat, madam…
your coat, young gentleman, young lady.” No one
gives a damn what the Footman says
until it’s too late.

You wonder why
I snicker. It’s not at anyone
waiting for their coat —

it’s that in all that time I’ve been doing this,
I’ve never understood why I was the one chosen to do it.
Maybe it was these arms, lean enough to seem burdened
by the weight. Maybe it was this face, my brown bagged eyes,
round chin, simple jowls that shake when I move. Maybe
I just look good in the uniform —

but I think, just maybe, it was the snicker
that got me here; the twitch born of fear
that made me seem the Perfect Bastard.
If I’d kept quiet that first time,
I might not have worked out so well.
I might have been fired.
I might not have had to do this.

Pity.

I have to go. There’s a coat needs holding
in a room across town, where some young writer
who imagines himself old and tired
thinks he’s ready to put it on.
I do not think he will this time,
but I will be there just in case.

Writers, by the way,
are the worst: they keep you guessing.
Will this be their time at last, or is it
just a ploy to wring more material out of
the misery they so seem to enjoy? Sometimes,
just for laughs,
I want to wrestle them into the coat
before they’re really ready.

Sometimes I do just that.