It’s 1998 and you’re in New York.
You sit Buddha-style
Like a beggar’s cup
On a cold Brooklyn sidewalk.
The passersby stuff coins in you
Like a karma slot machine;
They measure their generosity
Against your God-bless-you’s.
Raised, reared, reviled in Texas —
That’s where you’ll return to;
Less welcome than a polished
Thief dry-drifting through
Oil-rich streets.
You are a blood-warm stain on the sidewalk;
Bitter as wormwood, pale as pigeon
Shit, dirty like a soiled rubber, pleading
Like an empty coffee cup
For greenbacks and silver.
So, you’ve sown roots in a shelter
Like a soup-bowl monk;
Eating yesterday’s bagels,
Sleeping on threadbare mats,
And smelling the lozenges
In a sick man’s cough,
Now cold night unpeels white
Stripes from the sky,
Glass giants electrified stab
At the moon like spears,
Brick-red daggers plunge
Deep into the black,
And twilight bleeds rain bright
As falling stars.
It’s bleak October and the wind
Rolls musty sewage down
The gasoline avenues.
The towers rise in the distance
And rise like twin Babels.
You walk among the gray
Metroplex-catacombs, among
The coffin-cars and the
Multitudes, the split atomic
Families, and through the
Nuclear waste allies.
Solitude calls your name
Like a number in a
Food stamp line. The Hudson
Washes with toxins and tears
Your shattered eyes.
Ocean ice-streams flow
Between your bones.
Brain electricity
Ignites hot billboards,
Subway lines,
Buzzing bulbs —
Soul thrilling and brilliant.
You know too much not to laugh
At loneliness,
Even communal solitude.
You are a shadow
Indistinguishable from night.
Soon — winter
Streets too impoverished,
Too feverish, too
Congested with white
For your vagabond boots.
Your weak roots will be pulled out
Like weeds between sidewalk slabs.
So, bundle-up your carriage in Glad bags.
Return south, thin as a greyhound,
Sick as a cigarette butt.
1998 falls fast behind your
Footsteps … leave
Nothing else … save an empty coffee cup.
(This poem is written about my own life As a homeless teen on the street of New York..)
