by Adam Shechter

     It is at certain points of intersection between two seemingly unrelated lives that one looks at the other, and the latter, our object of scrutiny can do nothing but look away. He must.  For all that has amounted in time preceding this moment has awarded the looker the right of stare. As if everything that occurred before this temporal junction, no matter what it be, how great or small, bad or good, the universe between these two sets of eyes has appointed the first with an absolute confidence of visual inquiry, and the other no protection whatsoever from laying out his full optic soul, speechless, swirling,
exposed. Almost under the coercion of cosmic law, the man looked at is forced to bare the accusation of the looking eyes. After he has been watched, he can choose to look back. He may muster the total sum of all his hardness and nerve and jam his eyeballs full of it. But already, the first sensory act of judgment will have taken place. Our man will have been seen in his guilty nakedness. Though the question holds, guilty of what? Perhaps no more than being an individual whose complete set of life acts, counting both internal and external, temporarily equate moral inferiority just one degree less than the man who points his eye balls gazing. So the watched man cowers, coils into himself, almost as if he has just received a mortal blow. Very definitely, to say the least, threatened with elimination.

Adam Shechter is a poet and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is also the editor of the online arts and culture journal, The Blue Jew Yorker.