here is part of a poem i wrote for one of my collections. it was written in massachusetts where i spent most of my homeless years.
it is entitled "friends".
i sat at the place where you
work in the mornings,
waiting -- really, just daydreaming, humming to myself --
indolent or having only half the
rationale
you did ... being employed there. i wasn’t buying anything
much. you waited on tables and at the counter ...
used to my presence by the window.
a placemat, the crockery on
my table, silverware,
woven like the painting that you said
you liked ... me married to a scenery three
hundred miles away on a flat-topped
mountain
near the grand canyon.
i thought i heard you whistle
and turned around the
other day. you were not there --
leaving me to stare blankly at my tea.
the road waving in a liquid blue line
on the inside of the cup.
tomorrow you promised to
come back, filling your
work hours behind the
counter -- where you laughed
with your other friends, planning dinners and
holidays off at home:
sleeping, reading your books.
and you still see things
as if they are not the
dull flow of whatever you must have
planned for the week.
nice to hear from you.
write when you can.
i might drop by when i’m in town
and see if you’re still there.
here is my address ...
call
if you can.
[excerpted from "friends" from "Apple Cider" copyright
c Cathy Smith, 1993. please observe my copyright. i was a busy little
homeless person & this does have a registration.] if you like this poem
and the others i will post here, there will be a cd coming out sometime ($10
which includes postage in the US and Canada) with more poems, nice graphics,
my own photography and original music compositions as well. you can check
this link once in a while for updates. it will be designed to be a really
nice generic type gift with about one hundred pages of graphics, poetry &
MP3 audio with a choice of 3 formats to suit your PC: small splash page, full
screen for large monitors & an Explorer autoplay version which is for lower
capacity PCs.
The poem above was written in the Trident Cafe on Newbury Street in Boston where i used to panhandle seven days a week until the last bus ran down Massachusetts Avenue around midnight or slightly before that. i was just dreaming about traveling back to Arizona or California and some warmth. Boston is very cold in the winter and our shelter sometimes did not have blankets or sheets. so when you were cold or wet from the snow or sleet, you just had to curl up on a cold plastic-covered mattress in your coat. the idea of a hot sun was extremely appealing.
eventually i panhandled enough money to get a bus ticket to California where i stayed in the shelters there and for a month had my own room in a cheap hotel, the mighty St. Francis near Hollywood and Vine. i went back to Boston to panhandle during the summers.
working was negated for a while since i got a slight case of schizophrenia from my experiences. i am now in acupuncture/herbal therapy and it has worked wonders. as well as isolation up here in alaska where i now live. in case you do not know anything about schizophrenia, i have a very strong feeling that it is not a mental illness but an inner ear imbalance. i work a lot with Yoga practitioners all over the world and if one balances the chakras in each ear passage consciously, most of the audio and visual irritations of schizophrenia go away. in fact one of the cures for this disease is to use tuning forks & find the tones that one likes the best and one's ears then balance (especially ordinary left/right ear shifts during sound perception) naturally.
the midi song on this page, by the way, is an original composed just for this site . . .
but, enough for now, more poems & more of the story later . . .
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Updated: June, 2003.
