Thursday, April 09, 2015

Quote of the day.........

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, 

defend you From seasons such as these? 

Oh, I have ta'en Too little care of this! 

Take physic, pomp.

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

----King Lear.

Sunday, April 05, 2015

The storm...

Nothing he had ever seen before of life 

in the city or anywhere else had prepared him

for the stories they told him or

the chilling matter of fact-ness  of their telling,

as though the world that described was

the way the world has always been

as far as they knew would always go on being.

He came to realize that more often than not

their homelessness was not worse than the homes,

if they had ever had any, that they had fled or

be thrown out of a simply seen

fall pieces around their ears.

If the police would not let them sleep

in the subway, they simply moved on to

some boarded- up tenement or public latrine.

If they could get hold of drugs,

they injected oven cleaner, maybe , or 

sniffed glue or or gasoline, or

anything else that came their way.

If panhandling did not pay off they stole,or

if they weren't too battered looking,

they found somebody who would pay them

for the use of their bodies and may be even

take them in ,feed them and buy them cloths

and treat them decently for while,

often they would find themselves

a professional who would handle

such transactions for them,

enjoying themselves for free from time to time

and may be literally throwing them out

the window or off a fire escape when

they stopped bringing money.

If they were resourceful ,

they might pick up the price of a meal

by tearing out in to rush hour by traffic

when the lights turned red and swabbing off

wind shields with a wet rag, or

scourging the coin return slots of pay phones.

He suspected that beneath their opaque gaze,

they were asking them selves how

they might be able to make use of him

and wondering , if he in turn was asking

himself how and in what ways

he might be able to make use of them.

A girl would drop her eyes or a boy give

a knowing smile, when there did not seem

to be anything to smile at,and he suddenly

felt something that approached terror.

What terrified him was that

they were all of them for sale.

--- Fredric Buechner.