Category Archives: homeless

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This Is My City #16

Another spring snowfall. I saw these two resting beside the path where I ran this morning. I feel like curling up and tucking in like them only with a good book!
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I Wonder How Many People

nighttime-city

I Wonder How Many People in This City from “The Spice-Box of Earth” by Leonard Cohen

I wonder how many people in this city
Live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
Looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

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Primitive Figures

caveart

(internet photo)

Her voice, a gentle breeze
softly turns my ears.
Her eyes, dark waters,
submerge her hard earned wisdom.
A newsprint roll is tucked under an armpit.
Primitive figures on colorful cards she is selling,
dance behind dirty plastic.
She brushes stray hairs from her face.

I smile across our class, our heritage, our histories.
We are two feet apart, miles away from contact.
She lowers her eyes. I squirm in my casual trappings.

I offer money to purchase her cards. I talk too fast,
smile too broad. My rabbit-hopping heart cannot
keep up to my whirling dervish mind. The heavy air is
difficult to breathe.

She chants gratitude, over and over, head bowed.
I tell her, “It is nothing, really, no problem at all.”
I leave, my center hollow,
nothing to redeem me,
nothing at all.

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Tarnished Tiara

Her zombie steps shuffle along streets and alleys,
hair knotted and matted in unintended dreadlocks.
The cracked husk of her tarnished veneer reflects,
momentarily, in a boutique window and catches her eye.

Startled, she stares.

She glimpses a forgotten piece of her former self
beyond the plate glass. Flickers of another life
glint like sunshine on the glazed surface. Her
eyes close against the brightness.

A businessman in a navy suit, talking on his phone,
bumps her out of her reverie. He hurries on
without a glance, like stepping over dog shit.

She withdraws,
a hermit crab sliding into the safety of her shell,
disappears into her invisible life, slinking
along the streets.