The cold arrived earlier this week.

The cold arrived earlier this week,
10/25/06 1207pm
filling the vacant seats occupied by southerly winds last. Next week will bring spring weather I'm sure.

This city is change as much as a thought unchecked.

Everyday I find myself anew.

Yesterday I held back 62 years of tears, as I stood beholding the child's faces of war weary british soldiers. They came unintentionally to rescue me, but instead they beautifully cried. They gave us food, tents that would cook anything you want. All I wanted for two weeks was boiled potato. They setup tents of doctors, but aside from my sand papery throat my only ailment was emotions I can't understand streamming from my eyes. And that only lasted for a few weeks. This tattoo I'll will hold one day as a badge of remembrance, a chance to tell two kids in a falafel shop about the place where my parents, and my brother and my sister and my brother and my sister and my brother and my sister all died leaving only two sisters of a family of ten alive. One day it will be my duty to tell of auschwitz. But today the beautiful faces of crying soldiers touches me.

A month ago I was a young travelling catholic trying to discern. Following prayers and hopes, not committing for fear I hadn't heard His voice yet. Not knowing if this is where I was supposed to be or if I was to fly off to lousiana, california, india, france or ireland. Now I sit on the third floor of a hostel typing by hallway light knowing this is okay. Knowing that God is taking from me the comfort of home. That I might understand homelessness. That I might be comfortable in it. I'm 26 and now homeless, smiling that God has been so gracious to let me be. A month and a half ago I saw death. I saw the living spectre trying to devour masses of people. Masses of forgotten street, bridge and station trash suffering fatal wounds. Smelling of dead flesh rotting, of unrine and shit in their pants or wrapping come clothes... Seeing old faces beaten by time, uncared for except by four or five passing strangers... I never had a home never seen a bed or felt sheets. I haven't eaten fresh food in years. Trash is my staple as much as insult and abuse. My friend was beaten by the police to death, he was blind and couldn't move when they told him to. They smile when they claim his death 'yeah I did that'. I'm just an old man of 60 knowing that i'm deserve to be treated just once as a human before I die. I'm the 25 year old hispanic drawn to India, and thrown into doing a job I fear, a job that I can't do... I cant ... I'm not worthy, they deserve someone holy, someone loving, a doctor a nurse, but God's sake let me do the laundry... That all I'm good for... Trust me. I'm the 25 year old who noticed this man, fragile, weak, smelling of shit and maggots... I'm the unsure man who asks some friends what to do. Mother's house... I'm the confused boy washing a man twice my senior as a smile of dignity beams forth from a sandpapered face. I'm the confused boy who doesn't know what to do as he starts dying with joy on his face, following orders from those wiser. I'm the man haunted by the beauty of a human dignified enough to die in a bed with cotton sheets, but tenacious enough not to die on a rail platform.

Tonight I slam some in a poetry club in nyc. My words speak of my youth and my now, the guns, thugs and pains of growing up in the wrong part of Brooklyn. I'm black but would it matter if I was brown? We live in the same place. What if I was the white mother of a biracial child. Broken with the stares, insults and burdens of loving a black man . I grew up in the hood, I had a bad life, so what? I spin my words into songs of hope and stories of love. Touch my face, I couldn't be more real. Hear my voice let it bring you to my world. My story rivets both my own body and the coffins of my past.

This is how I live. Moment by moment, shelter by shelter, story by story in the city that begs at her door "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
108am