He liked being poor, the dusty cigarettes, the watery eyes, no judgment and no pretense, no achievements to be pulled away, just a spinning wheel of chaos: who would come home with a purple eye today? Whose possessions would be thrown out on the street? Who would suddenly, without warning, leave town, and why? The dinners at the mission are always warm. Most people on the street will give you coins to share some food. It's smoothed of complications here, you're either homeless or an outlaw who steals a wall and ceiling from a kind and hardened sucker who knows just what it feels like, holding out a key with bleeding heart still beating. How many a disability check can feed! All these faces tell such stories, of judgment turned inside until there's nothing that is left but hungry eyes. Satan is called Angel here, 'cos he offers up a homemade cure for shame: a moment of innocent crying.
He was happy to be poor, to poke each others' garbage for the cans turned in to cigarettes, the donuts that can keep the mornings peaceful, staring blankly on a bench. A day does not go by without a few more lives to save, by slapping them to consciousness or pulling off their chains if other resuscitation efforts fail. The workers go inside, to a place no one can get them, while the poor stay unprotected, only able to see themselves in every face that mills around, and so they share the little that they have, as a kind of wordless prayer, that there will be always enough, though they stay forever hungry and holy in the letting go of more. It's easy to be poor, to be one step away from falling through an endless crack. They like it that way, the tightrope that is humming like the voice of some dead god, who hung so many children for the crime of disrespect, who hang here floating still in an endless wind of pagans, with pilgrims just as monochrome, just as quick to condemn.
He finds a rose on a gravestone carved 200 years too late, for one of the unburied girls who lost one of her lives, and he gives it to another girl, who waits for something else, and he moves on like the wind to ask for money from the one protesting Christian, who warns of hell eternal to the goblins and the ghosts. He has too good a heart to tell him that it's all his fault, that he brought these demons here from all the hatred of his kind born of too much love for saviors. Instead, he asks for pennies, a thing that won't be given from a heart of Christian love, but what he later finds like autumn leaves in an alleyway the tourists never see, a present that's the present: a hamburger at Wendy's.
