very thinly and comically disguised

Rappin' with this dude named Ty from Soho;
he's an artist,
a painter,
an observer of the human condition and
other pretentious phases and phrases.

He listens to Coltrane by the light
of a black light as he slaps multicultural
swaths of color and texture across his life's
canvas and smokes a doobie the size of a
stogie and creates angry, bitter satire,
ironic and sardonic images designed to
mask his psychopathic preoccupations.

I like to engage Ty in discourses on
politics and sociology, religion and philosophy,
because his rejoinders are so hip and cryptic,
his delivery so razor-sharp,
his thoughts so intuitive and insightful,
I end up questioning everything i believe in.

I ask him if he believes in god, he says,
"If he believes in me,"
which on the surface seems so facile,
so cheeky,
so Dylanesque.

But as I reflect further
on this statement and delve
deeper into its content,
I sense a certain sadness and poignancy,
longing and desire, as well as a hint of hopelessness and despair.

When I challenge his logic,
he recoils and smiles sheepishly,
as if I have caught him in a lie.

He shrugs and avoids my eyes and
begins humming a Pink Floyd tune,
the one about feeling comfortably numb,
and immediately bursts into mirthful laughter,
wondering if I am "experienced like Jimi..."

I pause and inhale his breath and
wonder when he will come out
of his depression.

"Life is so non-linear and haphazard and
random, and yet,"
he swallows and chokes simultaneously,
but remains steadfast in his ability
to finish the thought.
"And yet there's such a pattern,
a coherence,
almost an anal/oral quality to it all,

I almost have to believe in something
larger than myself."

This is the closest I have ever heard him
come to acknowledgment and acceptance.

He has lived half his life quoting
Camus and Sartre and Marx and Heidegger and
prides himself on his non-beliefs in everything from
a higher being to the American dream and is practically
sadistic in his treatment of those who are loyal and devout,
idealistic and patriotic,
in love and matrimony;
the two are always mutually exclusive to him.

For the first time, I feel his existential foundation
beginning to crack.

However, my respect for his sensibility and
my compassion for his failures as a man precludes me
from destroying the structure he has so diligently
tried to construct,
to code or not to code, that is the question.

And so, we sit together
in a comfortable silence,
complacent and fat,
lonely and at peace,
wondering why the conversation lags and
why do we allow confrontations to go unchallenged?