I like Ken's "snap before its time." Suggest two things: one of the four repetitions of "little man" should go; and you don't need "Crookback." Reader knows who R3 is and his nickname; doesn't add anything.
I've been thinking, feeling, along similar lines. My latest:
The Unnameable
At one point he wanted to be complex.
Years later he succeeded. He made a
complete fool of himself
one evening, with accents of viciousness they
couldn’t decide were deliberate, and others of
distraction, which
never appeared mad enough
to be pitied. On the way home
in a passenger seat, he sang.
Vast darkling systems, standards, swirled
metaphysically around him. He sang these.
He thought of how the beauty of his song
was unlikely, and, if achieved, unwelcome.
He thought the branches clutching at the car,
the famished moon between them, imbecile
causality. He
thought, Since man is only marginally
a social animal, all the appropriate
terms, exploitation, abuse, are
relative. Thought how peace and even
miracles are often neither
recalled when needed, or forthcoming.
Would all the birthday parties ever
arranged for him be retroactively canceled?
Then he was twelve and then he was sixty
and then it was night and then it was morning.
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