Free Write 3/22 (Receipt)

Time is walking like a crook:
We lived for years
in a tent under the interstate -
blue highway, blue tent,
pools in our ears -
We slept for years
in a refrigerator box on the rooftop
sucking asphalt and sun.

On fourth and lombard
all the people talking like typewriters -
"How could she hate her life, she lives
in Florida?" Long range planning backward
goals, the calendar is a little woman who tempts us
to commit the sin of plastic.

Yesterday the whole front of the bus squished together for a man in a wheelchair who told us not to smoke this is what it had done to him for fourty-seven years like an ex-wife pulling at his veins like reigns. A woman told him "that's proof that the lord loves you, he could have chosen to take you away." He said: "Any smokers on this bus you better quit or you'll end up like me." Today on the train a seventy-six year old homeless man preached: "You are my audience, between this stop and the next you cannot move, you are captive, you will listen to me beg and grovel and guilt your eyes until your pockets find change!"