Tag Archives: homeless

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Sacred Calculations

I wouldn’t want you to walk away
with any miscalculations about me.

I am about as wild and crazy as society will allow
without confinement for my own protection.

Whenever I read a self-marketing sign

Please Help…
Vacancies of home and stomach,
Needing to be filled.

I feed the bearers of these signs
of society’s emargination
into raw and naked
erase and start again.

When I notice long-haired grunge,
low-budget gypsys with backpacks and shopping carts,
heading toward me asking to become excused
for asking for things they need,
I head in their direction
to find our best redirection
together.

My husband begrudges every dime
and points out I’m too wild
for pouring mostly alcohol
or worse down throats
without a home.
He claims they’re addicted suicides
waiting for death’s embrace.

But, I say this is too often true
and who am I to judge
those who explore doing their best
of worst available options
given all their dark stuff come before
through self-medication
mixed with sheltered soups
and public kitchens?

Were I or he on that street
rejected by our own history of defeat
I would hope to find those wise enough to stay
with me long enough
to help medicate my way,
to suffer with my emptiness
and ask me please to stay,
tell them all my blues,
sing and dance this suffering away.

I’m retired.
Have more cash than I could ever need,
and don’t want to go out that way,
hoarding funds for those who already have too much
while somewhere out there stands
a homeless sign whose bearer
prefers to drink her lunch.

If our legacy composes
both what we do for love
and what we do not do from fear,
If both our action and omissions,
our positives and negatives,
remain behind to feed and haunt our kids,
then why would I not choose
to offer medicines of caring
when neglect is so clearly that of which
this homelessness was made.

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CareFueled Causes

You are charged with a misdemeanor,
based on witnesses
who thought they head you saying you were leaving
even though you knew
you dinged this red truck’s door.

I know they saw me like that
but that’s because they could not hear
I was the driver ahead of them
holding out a $5 or $10
or even a $20,
if that was the least I had,
to any one beside the road
wearing a self-made person sign:
Homeless
Please help me.

I never pass these opportunities to help.

You see I have an oldest son
now twenty-one
who is not quite right
and tries his best
but finding and keeping a peaceful train of thought,
much more a job,
is hard for him
and so he stays where he may be welcome
despite what he can ill afford
to rest on other’s dime and time.

I never pass a chance to help
when need for help is obvious
as the tears we face
when humanity feels disgraced,
effaced by race,
knowing only left behind
to do the best they can
to ask us to do our best, we can,
to help when they approach us
with life’s nutritional concerns.

I make it my business to always try to help
when someone’s in our mess.
It would be too out of character
to know me as these have heard,
doing my best to avoid
a dinged your door responsibility,
because if a mess I caused
I had no interest to not confess
and then open my eager to be warmed wallet,
already too long-suffering of neglect.

But I do confess,
these are all my messes,
and yours as well.
We have too often acclimated
to this culture,
where we do not actively care
for one another,
and so not so much for ourselves either.

I hope to treat each mess we cause
as gently and lovingly as I so hope
someone right now will find the faith to see
within my homeless not quite right son’s asking eyes:
Would you help me,
us?
Do you know yet,
already,
we are in this together,
or we are out to fall and lose apart?

If you see him
let him go
do not hold him
by his toe
be not mean or bad in return.
Try with me to relearn
he’s done his almost best
to get it more almost right
next time.

So feel free to lavish praise
on how close he might have come
to doing better.
This helps him, and you,
feel and remember better
and perhaps even rather less than worse.

It would be my misdemeanor
to not do my best
wherever I see our mess.
I confess
I cannot see me in this way.
These watchers and listeners and speakers against me
must misunderstand,
yet perhaps that’s all to life’s good.
Makes me wonder
how they would see me
if they had recognized that guy in front,
stopped to say yes to each homeless mess,
could we all better take time enough
to just say yes
to benefits of doubt?

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Gypsy Homebound

Heart is where my home finds graceful relationship,
where my soul simply IS,
my memories of becoming,
of being at my best,
sometimes my worst,
but always my most full, complete,
most abundantly contentious and content.

Home unveils life’s liturgy.
This home where I was conceived
and born
has rebirthed me each dawn
and decomposed through all my dream time,
where I grew up and out,
where brother moved away
from where I was married,
from where I buried my grandparents,
and then my parents.

As my body houses identity
my home houses body.
While home and self-identity can be distinguished
one from the other,
this is never a benign or wisely severing discrimination;
better as a distinction without prospects for contented difference,
dishearted separation.

My soul and mind and body fade and wilt
withdrawn by force and circumstance
from embryonic being.
To awaken or sleep away
in any profanely alien place,
without power or even hope to return
to more sacred memoried space,
fades my eyes and ears and nose,
my skin down to my spinal bones,
despair this senseless loss of sense
of life and breath and bread that once was mine
and could be mine to share again.

My home is where I live
my view of neighbors and town and Earth and life
flowing sedately toward, then past too quickly
on my backyard river of memory,
greeting ducks and swans
herons and eagles soaring by
to hunt this fertile rippling home with me
now fading into memory
as memory shades to sympathy and apathy,
and apathy to this sad self-isolation
from my heart’s dismembering womb.

Lavish price for a new bodied home
invites sublimating new with best familiar practices and intents,
artifacts of golden relational memories from past days
and life
and home,
reframed by unfamiliar
but gracefully welcoming
trees
and birds
and weeds.

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Hunger Management

Variations on a Punishing Theme

When people are hungry and at risk of homelessness
despair
wilting and climatic yet chronic extinction,
It is because their administrators and developers,
incubators and technical assistance providers
grantors and lenders
representatives and public sector officials
absorb too many investments and nutrients
for their own mouths and mortgages,
sleeping soundly at night
unaware of how their CQI intentions
economically and ecologically miss their orthopraxis mark
of solidarity and mutual subsidiarity,
of redeeming the bedtime and nutrients
they intended to invest in those with greater need.

Therefore the self-oppressive unruliness of hungry homeless people
Is due to over absorbent interference of well-intended practitioners
expert administrators
senior consultants.
That is why dominated marginal monoculturalists of poverty
are so dissonantly unruly.

Chronically at-risk people are not afraid of death’s dissonance
and entropic trends,
Because they are anxious to survive,
to build life; not so much death and perpetual advent.
That is why wilting lives are not afraid of macrosystemic death trends.
It is mutual-mentors who invest in cooperative living
That incarnate wise evolution of deep ecologically balancing lives.

Self-composting toilets
have surprisingly greater value
to people without a pot to pee in
than self-composting banks.

 

Transposition of Laotse’s “On Punishment-4”, p. 302, Modern Library, 1942, Lin Yutang translator and editor.

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