the feral man on del amo

the feral man on del amo

A man can work his entire life 

for things that will need to be replaced,

that’s why it’s called the rat race,

next time you’re stuck in traffic

look around,

pick out one face,

and tell me 

you see a person 

who wouldn’t rather be 

in another place.

At Del Amo and Fordyce

in the left turn lane at the light,

a man sat on the median 

that divided the bridge,

wore torn pants that became shorts,

had no shirt on his back,

and only male pattern baldness on his head;

a car stopped,

rolled down its window,

a hand offered a 5 dollar bill,

he looked at it and turned away.

Is it looking a gift horse

in the mouth

if what you want to give

isn’t what someone else

wants to receive;

sympathy differs from empathy,

walking a mile in this man’s shoes

could contain the possibility

that freedom looks different 

then you have believed.

If he was a character 

in one of my scripts,

I thought about how

to make his plight adaptable enough

for the audience to see

how he sees

and come to believe

that his life

was not all that different than theirs

and if it hadn’t been

but for a couple bad breaks

he’d be where they are and vice versa,

but then also leave 

enough room for character growth

so that I could show 

the man had the balls

to overcome his tragedy.

But Will Smith 

is full of shit, 

the Constitution’s Pursuit of Happiness

means something different to me

than it does you

and if that’s truth

what about this man

who’s only tangible property

is a blue tarp

that he uses to sleep?

Sitting on the curb myself,

a lunch break on a sunny day,

I looked up to see 

the feral man coming my way.

“From around here?”

“Grew up off 223rd,”

he says. “Just to the south.”

“Do you have a house?”

He didn’t so much sigh, 

as he did pause 

in a moment of self-reflection. 

“I did, he says. 

“But one day said fuck it 

and walked out.”