Homeless Bound: A Poem on Homelessness and Humanity
Homeless Bound
You’re a vagabond, a two bit clown
You charlatan,
Sleeping in your own feces
What brought you to this hell-whole?
This inner space of longing and despair?
Longing for a warm embrace
Who are you man, with your upturned frown?
With your magic crystal pipe and your temper’s dynamite?
What happened to make you fall
A-sleep through your own existence?
Who are these demons that have driven you here?
Did you get their licence plate number?
The ones you argue with all day on the street,
The ones who drown you in fear and misery?
The ones you are speaking to right now while I recite this poem.
Who are the devils who make you shout and scream on the street corner on your pavement of shame?
Who did this to you?
Which monster soiled your clothes?
And chased you down the alleyway to where you hide from your life?
Hide and huddle under your sleeping bag drenched in urine.
Your Whole Food’s shopping cart full of dirty clothes and broken dolls.
The dog you feed and care for more than yourself.
Your debris of useless familiar possessions you could not bear to leave behind.
Who drove you to this insanity,
Or did you call an Uber?
Was it me then, after all?
Did I do this to you with my neglect?
With my high minded judgement.
With my stepping over your sleeping corpse?
With my avoidance of your pleading gaze
When I ignored you tripping over your own tied-together shoes?
Was it me, because I did nothing when I could of?
Because I was too preoccupied with my own useless, familiar self-possessions?
($85 a month of public storage).
Is it because I ignored you when you tied your shoes together ?Or if I did see you and looked away, shaking my head
At the slapstick clown you have become?
Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin gone to seed
Shitting in their own clown shoes.
You had a job once
You had a wife once
You served your country once.
Now you serve the rats in your alleyways
You’re a waiter serving up garbage and despair.
A collector of cans and copper wire.
Did you steal my bike today to trade to Judas for his silver?
Are you Jesus betrayed so that the Romans might like us? (The best seats .at the orgy.)
No, instead you are Sampson chained to the broken pillars of our “community”.
You are David with a tangled slingshot,
Daedalus with broken wings.
You are my brother and my father.
You are the son,
I have forsaken.
For the sake of a better car.
My shelter is my castle,
From who’s high, lofty turret towers
I pour anguish down upon your head
I pour my diarrhea of sanctimony
Down upon your head!
I write you off.
I wish you were dead.
Instead of haunting my street corners
My pavements, my libraries and alley ways
Plugging your phone in at Star Bucks
Just to watch your cartoons all day
With the phone Obama gave you to call for help.
To call for your sanity to return.
I will call the police
I will call the police
I will call the police
I will call the In-Sanitation
department of human garbage.
They’ll come in a truck to bag you up and haul you away, for the refuse that you are.
They will throw you into jail cells without clocks or any measure of time.
They’ll lock you up into tented cities far away from the children of humankind.
Lest the children see what could happen to them if they will not tow the line.
Now you do have to live like a refugee!
In these times of Oceanic Wealth
That drown the poor in misery
In squalor.
In dead end jobs
3 at a time just to pay the uncontrollable rent.
Who did this to you, you dusty pale ghost of your former self?
Who beat your spirit down?
Who lost you to become unfound?
Who beat you to the ground?
Who broke your holy crown?
Was it me?
Did I do this to you?
Was it me?
When I forgot that you were me?
Was it me?
When I took silver for my humanity?
Was it me?
You are my father, you are my brother
Was it me?
You are my son that I have now forsaken
For the sake of a better car.
Was it me?
Did I forget that you were me?
igorgoldkind
This is a very poignant heart felt wrote. The raw truth of the matter. We are all guilty of turning our heads instead of helping. Evrn if we helped one person it would be a miracle they’ve been waiting for. Where the human kindness in humans. Where is the humane in people. I wonder!
December 10, 2024 at 17:29