Since I'm going up to Berkeley/S.F. for the weekend, I'll put up a poem by Jack Hirschman, former poet laureate of San Francisco. Jack is a longtime homeless activist, and used to be involved in projects with activists and poets like my friend Carol Tarlen, Sarah Menefee, and David Joseph in feeding homeless in San Francisco. Since it was illegal to feed the homeless, many got arrested for it. Years later the mayor appointed Jack poet laureate , so Jack organized a series of excellent poetry readings in S.F. public libraries bringing poetry to neighborhoods all over the city.

 HOME by Jack Hirschman

 

Winter has come.

In doorways, in alleys, at the top

of churchsteps,

under cardboard, under rag-blankets

or, if lucky, in plastic sacks,

after another day of humiliation,

sleeping,

freezing,

isolated, divided, penniless,

jobless, wheezing, dirty

skin wrapped around cold bones,

that's us, that's us in the USA,

hard concrete, cold pillow,

where fire? where drink?

damned stiffs in a drawer

soon if, and who cares?

shudders so intimate,

our hands finally closed in clench

after another day panhandling,

tongues hanging out;

dogs ate more today, are curled

at the feet of beds, can belch, fart,

have hospitals they can be taken to,

they'll come out of houses and sniff

us dead one day,

pieces of shit lying scattered here

in an American city

reknowned for its food and culture.

The concrete is our sweat hardened,

the bridge our vampirized blood;

the downtown, Tenderloin and Broadway lights --

our corpuscles transformed into ads;

our pulse-beat the sound tengtengendeng

of coins piling up on counters,

in phone booths, Bart machines, tengtengendeng

in parking meters, pinball contraptions,

public lavatories, toll booths;

our skin converted into dollar bills,

plastic cards, banknotes, lampshades

for executive offices, newspapers,

toilet paper;

our heart -- the bloody organ the State

gobbles like a geek in a sideshow

that's become a national circus of the damned.

O murderous system of munitions and inhuman rights

that has plundered our pockets and dignity,

O enterprise of crime that calls us criminals,

terrorism that cries we are fearful,

greed that evicts us from the places we ourselves have built,

miserable war-mongery that sentences us to misery

and public exposure as public nuisances

to keep a filthy republic clean --

this time we shall not be disappeared

in innercity ghetto barrio or morgue,

this time our numbers are growing into battalions

of united cries:

We want the empty offices collecting dust!

We want the movie houses from midnite til dawn!

We want the churches opened 24 gods a day!

We built them. They're ours. We want them!

No more doorways, garbage-pail alleys,

no more automobile graveyards,

underground sewer slums.

We want public housing!

No more rat-pit tubing, burnt-out rubble-caves,

no more rain-soaked dirt in the mouth,

empty dumpster nightmares of avalanches of trash

and broken bricks,

screams of women hallucinating at Muni entrance gates,

no more kids with death-rattling teeth

under discarded tarp.

We want public housing!

we the veterans of your insane wars,

workers battered into jobless oblivion,

the factory young: fingers crushed into handout

on Chumpchange St.,

the factory old: spat-out phlegm from the sick

corporate chest of Profits.

Instead of raped respect, jobs

with enough to live on!

Instead of exile and eviction in this,

our home, our land,

Homeland once and for all

for one and all

and not just this one-legged cry

on a crutch on a rainy sidewalk.

(Copyright 2006 by Jack Hirschman)