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Descending the brick stairs,
Hearing the sirens in the rain,
Men and women running with cell phones
To catch the train.
The wafting whiff of urine,
The pigeons pecking at pop corn kernals
Graffiti in the cracks claiming CLASS WAR,
A homeless man waiting in waylay
Wavering to sell his jeans.
AL is his name,
Du-rag dangling from his desert head
Stubble beard, peppery pine.
He runs from recovery, heroin his flight.
"Five dollars a bag" he says "South its fifty"
So I stay up north where heroin numbs the cold.
O how I feel so old, my memoir manifold and untold
Tomorrow I'll be ... O I forgot my age, another
page,
Another stage.
His family is dead
His will to live not yet diminished
Somehow he believes his life is unfinished
Hope written on the walls, in the crevices of his
face.
"Somebody listen to me, have a coffee with me,
Eat a flaky pastry with me at the cafe de Americano,
Somebody, please."
"I've made wrong choices, yes ...
But who killed my family?
Who stole away my job?"
AL, he stands there, shoes untied,
Eyes sagging like a pregnant woman's belly,
A stranger in misery.
A body hanging like wet shoes on a clothes-line
This is AL, AL who tries to sell his jeans in the
tunnel.
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Writer Profile
Daniel Brophy
Homelessness. Poverty. Hunger. Men under bridges with rain dripping on their scruffy faces.
Every day I am exposed to these tragedies. I can't help but to address them, somehow. But in them, in the corners, in the cracks of the paint, or on the walls in graffiti, their is some message of hope for the viewer. I guess what I want to say is this - in our darkest most depressing of times, there is hope, we just have to find it, to look at our life, to listen to it, and find it.
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