I.
Some doors sense you coming
before you reach the glass.
They slide aside like practiced servants.
Polished brass smiles invite you in.
To stay, to spend, to leave
your money on the counter
and promise to return.
They know the language of desire,
the currency of want,
the subtle art of making strangers
feel like honored guests.
They open because your footsteps
feed their hunger,
because every kindness carries a ledger,
and every welcome has a cost.
II.
Some doors keep you out
unless you pay the price,
the dues or jump through hoops
suspended over moats of judgment.
You must produce the proper papers,
speak the secret words,
wear the matching uniform
to prove that you belong.
No handles on the side you stand.
The concierge has forgotten why
they hold doors open,
but they hold them anyway
just wide enough to measure your worth
before you cross inside.
You watch people knock
until their knuckles bleed,
Watch them mistake rejection
for some deficiency in themselves.
Mistake locked doors as proof
they don’t deserve to enter.
III.
Some doors close behind you
to the sounds of clinking iron.
Turn a person into a number,
a name into a charge,
a life into a lesson
someone insists you must learn.
They lock you up, because you’re dangerous,
because you disobeyed,
because you strayed from acceptable behavior,
because you would not bend
or let them question you into silence
or turn your difference into shame.
Iron doors with bars, with rules,
with expectations that ruin reputations,
with invisible locks of fear that grow
conformity for polite society
and make the hardest doors to open
the ones you close against yourself.
IV
You oil hinges, pick locks, hold open doors
just because you can.
You show mercy to a rusty hinge,
tell them a stranger waits outside
and may have answers to questions
no one thought to ask.
You hold the door for the wanderer,
the misfit, the latecomer,
the one who has forgotten
what welcome feels like
and the one who cannot afford admission.
You don’t ask whether they’ve
earned the right of passage.
You don’t even know what waits beyond the door.
You only know too many doors
are closed because they’re different.
They must barter dignity
before they’re allowed to leave.
So you oil hinges, pick locks,
stand aside to let them pass,
and remain on the outside looking in
with hands that smell of machine oil
and your pockets full of keys.
10-10-26
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