Homeless Fragments - These poems

There is nothing nice about homelessness. Socially, it is the experience of a human being who -- because of physical, mental, or social circumstances ends up excluded from the regular give and take, the ordinary relationships, that make up our experience. Homelessness, as we visualize it in the big cities, is a man or a woman sleeping on steam grates, a person who sits in a subway car and so is rancid that most passengers crowd into neighboring crowds rather than admit the smell and odor during their commute. Homelessness revolts: Not only in its emotional response of revolt-ing, but also in its challenge to our bourgeoise notions of propriety. We can see a homeless person, but that "seeing" challenges our entire notion of our self and of our presence. We have to look -- as much as we have to look away. But homelessness is not static. It is a progression. A person does not become homeless by sudden chance (unless they are in a war zone or they experience a calamity: But in that case, a person is not "homeless". They are without a home, for sure. But in most cases they still have the social fabric and connections supporting them that allow them to rebuild). Rather homelessness is gradual. It comes from choices that individuals make in reaction to others — and in reaction to themselves.

The poems that are collected here were written during my studies of community economic development and public finance at the Bloustein School and at the Fels Institute. During that period (from 2007 to 2011), I read deeply into what academics viewed as the origins and source of poverty and what their proposed solutions were. During that period, I also moved my family to inner city Trenton. For about 8 months we lived in the depth of the inner city, where I observed homelessness among "the poor" and experienced the community of the inner city (of being a part of the excluded). The inner city in its actuality, in its red-lined separation, is not like many academics describe. Externally, it has a compelling dissheveledness about it, but internally the ties between individuals in the community (and the pressures of daily living) compel them to "survive" together. The experience of the inner city is much like that of the experience of living in a rural area in the mid-West. Regardless of the inner cohesiveness of social interaction, outside pressures became more and more palpable the longer we stayed there. Somehow, the observation that people "from Trenton" were poor (and outcast) began applying to my family. It was as if, regardless of who we were as individuals, by virtue of where we lived, we were becoming a part of the caste of those "from Trenton." Individuals from other inner city areas experience the same thing. And financially it made a difference too. Credit and loans became harder to obtain, and when we left, our cable company and the utilities demanded deposits from us as we moved from Trenton to the Princeton area. Engraved in the system was a tacit understanding that people don't move from Trenton to Princeton -- and, if they do, they don't deserve too. This is the real statement of red-lining. And it is the real judgment of what homelessness is.

The poems then reflect on different tranches of the homelessness experience. Like tranches of those very mortgage-backed securities that gutted entire communities during the financial crisis of 2007/2008, these poems provide a view from my mind's eye into (and on to) the experience of homelessness in its complete diversity -- from the young boy in Philadelphia throwing up in a public restroom to the lady in Trenton who slept in the bus shelter (if you could even call it that) during the winter ... each poem is about an instance of homelessness in America that I observed as a passerby. Hopefully these poems are as real to you as I experienced them. Of course, they aren't poems of pleasure, but if they move your consciousness to awareness (and maybe even to action - to a certain level of greater understanding and maybe, even, kindness) then maybe we can work toward creating a better, more socially inclusive, world.

Chicago, September 2016

Kooser's Unexpected Tulips ©2005

Plane filled with passengers
Air conditioned vents dulled the engine's roar
Seat buckles clicked like cocking guns
and ear phones shackled minds to LDMonitors embedded behind
          someone else's skull

Mother sits at home on a moth-eaten sofa
chomping on stale apple pie and CNN reruns
expecting the latest on her son's soon departure and
          early arrival

While brother raises acoustics on the better mousetrap
mouse scampers, ears plunging, toward her children,
skurry nest
          no droppings tonight

Baptist missionary blondes the earth with gold preachings
fingers pointing to trees' designs and crystalline rays
North Dakota ranch houses and Nebraska plains
          leveled blue skies

Up in the frozen tundra of Northwestern Iowa
an old man lying dystrophied in bed
meets the eyes of his son-in-law and says I don't care
          about the rest

Take care of my daughter

Hollywood Cemetery on A June Afternoon

Hollywood Cemetery on A June Afternoon (after Sara Teasdale’s “A November Night”)

Peter Manda ©2013

Let us go down to where people die

Across the highway and, There! Up by,

Where the streetlights shine; and lie

preaching sobriety on Fridays; the White Men give

To you and I a token. Thinking surreal is

A necklace hugged around your shoulders.

The coffee fresh still to play with

Styrofoam, folded along the edges open.

Down the street where once we

pried the second story windows and sat

On the warm tar roof; smoking cigarettes and drinking beer

The cicada not yet ruffling in the trees, the

Damp heat not yet settled on the hill;

Our royal carriage, your bed, where in many long

Afternoons we enjoyed our youth; you on me

And I … hard at work for several whole days.

Across the street and around the corner;

A gate.

Some will hurry out from and others wade in

Down the curved hill; a chain and bars and velvet

Grass, carefully shorn; some dimples and divots in the ground.

Children could have played with haughty joy

Were silence not so golden.

Out in the corners past the thousands buried for bars

And stripes; memories fade of blue eyes, a smile, and

Hatred for Nixon! The shadows of chestnuts and magnolia

Cover those traces of scattered skulls under

Angel wings. Some hope here that love will find

Them; among those empty fields of hearts remaining

On benches, one last time. Wedding

Rings no more. Over the crest of the hill

And on the river. Flowing past in daytime

You can imagine the moon.

A man standing beckoning East –

In hope for cotton trade; as others, wrought under steel

bars and gates Sought union; still in delusion that their commerce

Could continue, intertwined in the withering

Decomposition; of dust

As footprints in the grass, barefoot and all

Carried the frail dew with them

Like firefly nova; bursting, then flickering.

One last time.

An "Our Father" for our Times ©2013

Dear God,

 you who do not exist but in the conscience of Man
and whose voice I only hear in the space between my ears, 
shallower be your name, 
thy Kingdom done, 
thy will be undone, 
at least as imagined here on Earth. 
I hope I can forage my daily bread 
and that the luck of the hunt is mine, 
that In hunting I'm not so foolish as to rely on you, 
the figment of my imagination, 
to replace the abundance of resources I selfishly deplete; 
and I hope no one notices how selfish I am 
so that maybe this time I can get away with it 
without anyone noticing 
so I can continue to claim 
that I am better than anyone else 
and can get people to follow my self-righteousness. 

Amen.

Captain - (after Sara Teasdale - "Pierrot") (c) 2013

Captain - (after Sara Teasdale - "Pierrot")

Captain plays in the garden,

The one we never had -

He digs a hole to find a bone;

The one that makes me sad.

Captain plays in the garden,

He thinks I'll come for him -

But he is long forgotten,

His memory would make me glim.

Captain plays in the garden,

And all the field hands know,

That Captain loves his ball -

Do I still love him so?

a late night haiku ©2012

I linger in the dust
of a long day's processing
as she showers
herself with the flood
of satisfactions to come

Stars sliding past the moon ©2012

Cat tongue licked before perching
Dog
snorts, I type
the lines
Wife and son sleep enrobed
by
the comfort of
belonging to
stars sliding past the moon