Homeless in Seattle.

If You Prick me, Do I not Breed?

Like pensive cattle lying on a parched, dry California heap of brown, sun-dried earth, they turn their eyes towards the hard-hearted passersby; they watch their feet as they hold out a hand of despair, fighting off the sweet languor of desperation amid their bitter shivering. There are some who call out for your help while wracked with howling fevers, with naught but that ancient duller of physical pain, distilled brews that bruise them even further.

The churches, those Reagan-era bastions that declared anti-poverty programs should be destroyed so that they could do their rightful job of providing succor to the needy, are but tax-free havens that ply the late-night airwaves with calls for cash for which they promise that the god of consumption will reward worshipers of the Almighty, as in dollar, with a New Car! A Cache of Cash! While they bolt their doors against the wretched lest they scare off their well-heeled worshipers, never mind that all they worship is Baal, the god of gold, the Avatar of Greed.

Devils and monsters, they consider themselves great souls destined to rank among the chosen in their imagined hereafter, and thus are they contemptuous of reality; seekers of the infinite, they step gingerly over the filthy heap of rags; hold their noses against the rank odor of Capitalism's detritus, encased, as they are, in their carapace of moral righteousness. The idea that the god they pretend to worship would gladly don his crown of thorns yet again to show them the real nature of worship, and the place that compassion deserves in those who claim belief in his message, has never cracked the shell they have carefully built around their hearts. 

Meanwhile to the vaults of fathomless sadness, to which a nation besotted with Disneyland as though it weren't but a land of make-believe even 12-year-olds sneer at, is condemned, those whose destiny has already banished faith, crushed hope, and destroyed love are strewn across the dirty pavement as crushed underfoot as the cigarette butts their homeless encampments are stewn with. There there is no pink; no gay day replete with prismed light ever enters; there, alone with chill-bane-inducing Night that makes for a gloomy landlady, they huddle together on concrete as cold as Bill Gates' heart at night, while heating to rival Hell's kitchen during the day. Theirs is a bleak universe with leaden horizons in whose darkness floats horrors while blasphemies they refer to as "prayer" hover in the air as they issue from the mouths of the faithful as if to demonstrate the mockery their sham religiosity has become.

We now have, it is true, we corrupt nations, marvels unknown to the ancient world; but to counter them, we have created horrors unknown to them as well. Surrounded as we are by the failure of the Market as the Sole SuperPower, the only Force against to measure success, or to use to decide what we, as a nation, an individual, a world, pursues, continue to ignore how short it falls from its original promise of grandeur as we gingerly step over the ragged nakedness of a man whose eyes we avoid, filled as they are with a chilling darkness that envelops his soul as he lies in a squalid pile of filth whose reek nauseates us. While their women, whose twisted bodies, undernourished and skinny, pot-bellied or flabby, are pale as church candles, fed and gnawed away by debauchery, drag along the inheritance of their sex's vice: the low-hanging vestiges of fecundity.

Evening skies are now filled with choking air from wildfires thickening night like a wall so that every breath inhales air laced with poison gases. There are those among them who, by the light of purloined candles whose flickering shadows on their faces reveal hollows as deep as old pagan caves, call on your help in their raging fevers, if for nothing else than a drop, a shot, a Packie's nip, to ease the pain of their eternal remorse. But in this cold city, full of hopeless tears, its canyons echoing stifled sobs, great souls contemptuous of reality are too busy seeking the infinite to have capacity for pity. Your bleak sufferings, your unquenched thirsts, and the dried  springs of love with which your hearts were once full, are as remote to them as a needle in space.