I walk to work

down Broadway

every mid-morning

one foot and then the next

back forth up down

And today I witnessed a homeless man

roughing up his old lady

and I weighed the moral decision

of whether I should interfere

and finally decided to let it slide

If he was roughing her up

in front of my house

I would have said something

But it was on the side of the road

concealed by shrubbery

Where else would homeless domestic violence take place?

He never hit her

He just held her

and shook her

and raised his hand at her

His leathered face

met mine as I hip-hopped by

wearing headphones

and if homeless people have shame

I drew it out of him

with my stare

The more I pick them up and put them down

the further my feet feel from my body

The fake Doc Martens I have strapped to my dogs

are not giving them the love they need

I have poetry vision today.

Everything I see

and everything I hear

everything I feel

flows through a poetic filter inside my brain

and words that will never be written

linger in my brainworks and sweeten by view

before they are gone forever

and become nothing but sub-conscious reasons

to buy a voice recorder

All those majestic and unwritten poems

lost in my experience

like scuttled cigarette butts

on 17th and Broadway

I past by an old woman

On 16th street

probably homeless

peeling a bandage

off a sore on her leg.

And as I walked by

I found myself in the perfect position

to peer into the wound

and I saw that it was fleshy

and nasty

The next block I notice a Viet Nam veteran

with a sign and a cup

He is asking for change

sitting against an abandoned building

staring at something

And as I walked past him I observe

a homeless Vietnamese man

who has stopped in his tracks

and engaged the veteran

in an intense staring contest

They stare at each other

perhaps out of mutual respect

mutual hatred

or a sort of kinship

I don’t know

At the corner of 14th and Broadway

there is a raggedy man

who is laughing at nothing

but probably everything

and I’m glad the voices in his head

are witty instead of terrifying

INSERT VERSE

A man tries to bum a cigarette from me

and I make a gesture

to say I can’t hear him

through the headphones

that I wear so I wont hear him

and I walk on

one foot and then the next

back forth up down

As I continue to make my way to WORK

An incredibly fat man passes me

so fat that he has been relegated

to a permanent state of sitting

He rides in a little cart

and passes me

at the intersection of 11th and Broadway

and ignores

the steady red hand

and jay rides

10:15 in the morning and there is a crowd in front of Chee Chee’s

I breeze past and get a whiff of the smell I call “day drinking”

On 9th street I hope over a stream of fluid

working its way

across the sidewalk

to the gutter

from a sleeping man’s pelvis region.

This is not uncommon

The closer I get to WORK

the more suits and ties

I notice amongst the derelicts

and my environment

grows dense with business

They look at me

like I look at the bums and beggars

I’m an artist man!

To be accepted by either the homeless

or the business class

would deem me failure

I am lost

a man without a suitable social class

in a world of haves and have-nots

and me in the middle with some money

and some pride.

All the pretty girls walk past afraid to smile

afraid of anything

with a penis out on these mean streets

I’m a nice guy.

In front of Horton Plaza, there is a woman giving away free t-shirts

to anyone who applies for Visa credit card.

Now all the homeless have new shirts

but no credit cards.

Out in front of WORK

I stop for a moment of introspection.

Five hours of my life

are about to be surrendered

and no poetry will be written or thought as I sling plates at power lunches.

WORK detects the poetry inside of me

and eliminates it like out of date equipment.

The handbook specifically says,

section 18, number 4, “NO POETRY”

The WORK building stands in front of me, 20 stories high.

Me, 5’5”.

I walk through double-doors that state how wonderful I am

and the poetry dissipates

I am now at WORK

47 minutes into my work experience

a girl named Jill

breaks the no poetry rule

by commenting that Steve Perry’s voice on the house speakers

is a “Journey” into her past.

We laugh then look around to insure we weren’t detected

No other poetry finds its way into WORK today

I was lucky to have what I did

Mid-afternoon.

I leave through the same double doors and they send me happily on my way

I’m in quite a hurry.

While at WORK

I realized that today was my mother’s birthday

It’s already getting late on her side of the world

so I know time is of the essence.

I pick my dogs up and put them down faster than before

but now they are sore from my fake Doc’s lack of arch support

each step like thumbtacks

still I must hurry.

The afternoon scene on Broadway is different.

It is full of people who have had days as bad as mine or worse

filled with people trying to claw their way into the next income tax bracket

trying to backhand the guy that trained them

Trying, trying, trying,

to get ahead, to have the big big big money.

Some of them I look at and see their nighttime habits.

Their different uniforms are all still the same.

Men in shoes of a certain type

women in skirts and blazers

all armed with credit cards

cellular phones and special lingo.

Ladies who have forsaken their lives in order to become career women

Men who talk about wanting to fuck those women

I put on my head phones and press “play”

Thankful to be in the realm of an artist

even a dead one.

The number of Visa t-shirts on the homeless population of downtown San Diego

has doubled during the time I spent at work

Everywhere I look I see haggard men and toothless women sporting the Visa logo

across their chests.

The bus stop at Fifth and Broadway is full of pissed off minority kids

They have their uniforms too

I quickly assume my walking pace and glide past them

I see a homeless woman that I have cultivated a relationship with

She is Asian with yellow hair and she doesn’t recognize me today

because I don’t have my Elvis sunglasses on

I smile at her and she looks at me like I’m crazy.

I cross Broadway to the North side

because I like to look inside the bookstores and hairs salons

and because the bus stops are packed on the other side

full of more pissed off people

pissed off because they have to ride public transportation

Sometime in their life they probably had cars

but gave them up

or had them taken away

and they are angry

The buses come and gobble them up

concentrate them into an enclosed metal box

and whisk them away to places like Spring Valley, Lemon Grove and City Heights

Twelfth and Broadway.

The suit and ties are starting to taper off now

I am still thinking of mom and trying to avoid eye contact with anyone

The city churns behind me

It is going through its metamorphosis from daytime business district to nighttime nothingness

I have emerged from it again

At the corner of 18th and Broadway

I see an elderly black woman

clutching a fence and saying something I can’t hear through my headphones

Usually I would keep walking, but this woman seems to genuinely need me

I take off my headphones and say,

“What do you need?”

and she says,

“Go fuck your mother,” with an ear to ear grin

For a split second I almost allow myself to tear into her

then I keep walking

I realize she couldn’t possibly have known

it was my mom’s birthday

Then I think about the homeless woman’s birthday

and the slim chances her son will rush home to call her

and like every other bit of marked-down humanity I see downtown on a regular basis

I let it slide.