post-script to 'my beckettian life'

the walk home last night was uneventful but for one incident which is the second time in as many weeks this has happened. i don't know what it is, perhaps i look like a mark, or goofy, or too easy going. what i don't look like is a tough guy, a bruiser, a villain out of a kung fu movie. so there i was trying to cross a busy intersection when across the way was a group of real or wannabe gangsters in a cloacal mass blocking the entrance to the chevron station. finally they parted like the red sea to let a suv in to the station. then the light changed and i started walking across the street. i eyed an opening between the wannabe gangsters when i see one is sizing me up. he stands in my way and as i try to pass he makes a motion for a sucker punch and yells BAM! i jump, grab his arm out of instinct and yell, whoa dude! his friends crack up and that was that. i was more startled than angry nor did feel i was in any real danger. as i walked home i was thinking of an incident i'd read about samuel beckett. that he was randomly attacked and stabbed one night on a paris street and was seriously wounded. rather than becoming morose or getting angry at his attacker beckett took an amused detachment. in my reading of the incident i pictured the great old writer processing the attack as he did with language with parries and jabs and retreats and always with humor, mostly black humor, but his language is nearly always funny. thus i began the poem before i opened the door to my home.