I am on the street every day. Holding a chunk of cardboard, standing on the strip of street right in the middle, pretending I’m okay. Every day, I am hungry, chilly, alone. The winters are the worst without a home. The summers are almost as bad, but I can tolerate the weather then. However, in the winter, I am weary and thin. I don’t know how I make it by, no lie. My stomach would scream if it could, but instead it is reduced to lowly growls because I don’t know where in time my next meal stood. Every day, cars drive by, locking their doors, thinking I want more, shutting me out because I am begging. But what would you do?
What would you do if your marriage fell apart, they completely broke your heart, and you didn’t know how to save it? What if you lost your job to alcohol and depression and you can’t recover because you’re hesitating, and you end up thrown out? Thrown out of the small place with the dingy light over it because you can no longer afford the roof over your head- you know you’re dead. Pushed out, shoved out, called out, because higher classes of society lock their car doors at the sight of you, change to the other side of the street too because they think you’re going to cause them harm. How safe they are, in their small bubble without trouble, how nice it would be to live a life just that easy.
The homeless shelters always put me in a box, force me to be something they see me as - it *****. A thief and a lowlife someone who never had a kid or wife, someone who’s beyond hope, someone who wields a knife. And I’m scared because maybe they’re right. Maybe I am the one who wanders out in the night, hoping to give families a fright because desperation overtakes the body when you make this many mistakes.
The Walmart employees alway glance at me, don’t judge what I buy. I’m just getting what I can to get by, so I can stay high and away from reality, but no matter, I can’t escape me. I can’t escape myself and the things that I’ve done but c’mon, maybe you could with some cents - just one.
And maybe at the end of the day, I won’t give up hope. Maybe I’ll buy some patches to stop my habit made of smoke. Maybe one day, I can crawl out of this cold, and maybe right then, I’ll finally be whole.
Slam poetry style writing