Can you help me?
No. I’m sorry, he said. Then walked away.
Laying there in a pool of blood. A horrific sight. I don’t remember much of the evening.  The bars. The beer. The whiskey. The whore. Her name was…well, that’s not important either. As I was bleeding, mercilessly, a stranger offered no help. I’m sorry, he told me. What of sorrow did he know? I knew sorrow. There were fourteen knife wounds inflicted upon my wretched soul. I was a bum. A homeless sot with nothing and nobody. Rags. Full of stinking rags. Nobody took me in and cleaned me up. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Everyone is too full of themselves to recognize the piss they wade through every morning on their way to work. People don’t care anymore about people. They only care about themselves. About how much time another human being will suck down of their precious time that they have only to waste. Here I lie.  In the gutter, the filth of tomorrow and yesterday, yesteryear. Bleeding out of every orifice I own. Bleeding out of holes newly made. Blood trickling away into the dark street, the pavement, the concrete, the all mother earth. I am a bum, still human, with dignity and a heart, if that matters.

Does that matter? Does life matter? A man murders so justice deems he shall suffer the pain of the victim. Gas chambers, electric chairs, the alcohol swab injection. Who are these people? Fellow men of mine? Walking and talking. Can you spare some change? No, they say.  They keep the change, the few pennies, they leave it to the cashier, she puts it in a dish, for the next customer who needs it. Get a fucking job, they tell me. I know. I should. I should not ask you for the change that you toss away to a cashier. The utter stranger, as am I. Money goes round as does the earth. I love the earth. It has been good to me. Just not its people. They are cruel and dispirited. I don’t owe anyone anything. I only owe the earth for my time. It allowed me many happy years and now my time closes. I don’t want it to. I don’t want to say goodbye.  Not just yet.  I want to remember just a few things, such as my home, the alley.

In the alleyway, a cat dug through a garbage can,
eating gourmet trash and howling at the night.
A bum slept under a newspaper, and snored comfortably.
The traffic blared incessantly,
always on the move.
Outside the alley was the traffic, the lights,
the big To Do.
Outside the alley were people all jostling, blathering,
selling, living, doing, being.
Outside the alley holds the void, the misfits show,
the gallery ill-presentation.

In the night the stars shine, but outside the alley,
those artificial lights blind them.
If the alley cats were people they could tell stories
about all the stars they have seen outside the lights.
But they are not people, they are cats, so those stories are lost.

The shame of it all is that even people lose those stories.
They act like alley cats, with their heads down, scrounging around
in a garbage can.

Fourteen the number. The number of new holes easily created with malcontent. Why did he have to do that? Was it the nature of his ignorance?  Was it the projection of hate? Perhaps I offended him somehow. Is it cold outside?  Maybe it is warm. I cannot tell. Too much blood loss can do that to someone. In and out, I fade. I don’t have the time, he said. All we have is time.  It’s the only real thing, more than sex and money, trees dancing in a summer wind, children playing hopscotch, or a bum on the streets.

Horrible creature, don’t talk to my daughter. You hear me?
Yes ma’am. I apologize. I just wanted some spare change, that’s all.
You filthy people. Get a job!
I’m sorry again, ma’am.
I know your kind! Too lazy to find real work. All you want is a handout.
Okay, thanks anyway. Have a nice day.
That’s all you can do is sit there and drink. You’re all drunks. You ask for spare change just so you can fill your addictions.

I know, I said. Bums, wretched things. We sleep as long as we feel. We are not succumbed to alarm clocks and constrained freedoms. What is it to you or anybody what we do with our spare change? Are you in the gutter? No. You would probably throw your spare change away, or give it to a cashier at the next convenient store. Don’t you have a job to do?  Why don’t you just fuck off? All I asked for was some spare change.  Listen lady, it’s obvious you need to get laid.
How dare you speak to me that way?
How dare you presume my life? Leave me alone! Stuff your change. Stuff it somewhere that’ll put a smile on your face.

The nights are cold, damp, loud, and crowded. My hair too long, my face needs a shave. My beard hangs to my chest and I smell bad. Stink. The stink of rotten turnips and moldy fruit. Flies buzz all around me and sit upon me and when I swat them, they do not move. They talk to me. They tell me I was a good man for giving them something smelly to rest upon. The flies told me stories of old dog shit and rancid trash. They told me about the other homeless men who stink worse than I do. I am a wretch and my breath could kill with one blow. The nights are cold on the concrete under newspapers and cardboard. The flies keep me warm; keep me company when I am alone.

The world is a lonely place. The world is a rabid dog from hell. The world is cold and foolhardy. The world is miserable and full of misery. The world is an endless carrion diseased beast floating in an abysmal waste of echoing landscapes belching insanity and buggered madness protruding through the tar-filled lakes and open burning fields that we all walk endlessly through like zombified mutants following the flute of a mentally deteriorated pied piper. Here we are. Here we all are. In the thick of it. Trying and trying. Trying and dying. I found some clean clothes from the Salvation Army and I had a bath and got myself clean, felt like new, but I wasn’t. I was still me. A bum. Standing around a flaming burning barrel in the night. Someone wanted my new clothes given me out of charity, they could have gotten decent clothes too if only they took the time to ask, but they wanted mine. No, I repeated. They shoved me. Two of them. I stripped down to my underwear in the cold, embarrassed, alone, people were laughing. I ran to my sleeping place and put on my old rags once again. I felt different. I felt normal. I was back. Running once again from that rabid dog from hell, looking the part.

The lights are a grand thing in the city. The colors are fantastical, full of high spectrums and magnificence. Sometimes late at night the lights speak to you. Humming, dancing, as if out of some strange science fiction novel. Everyday turns into yesterday. I tried to become something. A man. A rodent. There was a time when the lights meant nothing to me. I would pass on by them like a robot, juggling two jobs and worrying about the following paycheck, if it was enough for all of my needs. Now I don’t have to worry about that. I wake up, ask for spare change, and buy my drink. We all have something, a beckoning something. The fancy man in a fancy suit, addicted to a particular lifestyle. Fancy Nancy and the baby all wrapped in topical gravy. There, that’s better. Now I can drive this Benz. The lap of luxury. What is that?

What’s the matter, sir? Is there something wrong?
I wanted heated seats and the one they sent me did not have that.
I’ll get right on that for you sir.
Yes, good, fine. At no extra cost? Seeing how they made the error.
Of course, sir. And we’ll even knock off and additional thousand for the inconvenience.
That’s great. Now, I have to run. Got a hot date with the missus.
Take care, sir.
Honey, I’m home. Look, you had better get ready or we’ll be late for the reservation.
Yes dear.

All of that without any change to spare for the beggar. Not even a measly nickel as they pass by dressed in mink, leather, and gold, driving their new Mercedes.

The blood begins to circle me now…so cold.

The rain falls heavy and hard. I cannot remember when it rained last. The sun has been a heathen to us all. Sweat dripped from our brow in bucket loads as the sweat encrusted my underarms. As if we bums don’t stink enough. Yet it was there. Filthy and disgusting. I hated the stench and tried to bath as often as I could. I stole bars of soap from the stores and went into the polluted waters or vacant all-night restrooms. Still, I felt better than when I did. The shelters were choosy about shower stalls, often a difficult gig just to scrub. My belongings sometimes grew legs and walked away while the soap ran down my naked body. At least in the polluted waters nobody would bother you. They would point and laugh perhaps at the idea a clean bum. Some would runaround horrified, screaming about indecent exposure. I never understood the nature of that. Everything is naked even when clothed.
Yet the rain continues to fall.  It feels good upon my wounds. It feels refreshing upon my skin. For some reason, of which I cannot explain, it feels warm. The rain falling from thousands of feet above feels nice. It washes away the blood in the alley, those pools of blood that gathered around me. As I look up to the heavens, I can see them, the droplets that appear twice the normal size. They look surreal. They look unnatural and unfathomable. The rain falls harder pelting my skin, my face, with a force that I cannot reckon with. I can hardly move. My muscles weak and my flesh limp. What happened to me? All of a sudden my life flashed before my eyes and here I now lie, alone and half dead. I hear the rain on the pavement. I have never noticed it until now, but in the silence, the rain sings upon the hardened streets. A song. A symphony.

The pavement has a smell:
the smell of old shoes, new shoes, rubber, exhaust,
vomit, spit, trash, paper, heat, cold, water, oil,
air, breath, alcohol, soda, rain, hotdogs, chilidogs,
various other foods, wood, clothing, cat, dog, bird,
cat-dog-bird-shit, blood, sweat, tears…
Oh yes, the pavement has a smell.

The air has a sound:
the sound of old black men laughing at the bus depot,
horns honking, feet, wind, rustling newspaper, jazz, more jazz,
voices, cards shuffling, doors opening, doors closing, rock and roll,
more voices, bands playing, people swallowing, hoopla, basketballs bouncing,
rims-ricochet, gunshots, screams, general laughter, engines revving, profanity,
poets, thoughts, pavement cracking, sewers, knifings, madness in the night…
Oh yes, the air has a sound.

The bum was stabbed by hoodlums,
dead for five days,
found stiff, and rotted under his newspaper.
The cat was licking his wounds.
No one came to claim the body.

I remember a long time ago, my friend Bobby Hosslynd took a bunch of crab apples from a tree near his house and carried them in this bucket in the shape of a pumpkin. It was about a week after Halloween and he rode up to my house with it. We were all of twelve or so and he said, Come on Mack, let’s go. That’s my name see, Mack. Mack Smithland. Bobby told me to get on my bike and go peg a few things with those crab apples. I didn’t know of the trouble we would get into at the time. We pegged a few things. Windows from houses, other kids from their bikes, moving cars on the freeway, anything we could. There was a time in the remoteness of everything, the finite-finite, the gifted grandeur of it all when the world was so kind that young boys would have thought twice about such things. Not now. Just as we broke everything we could with those apples and had our asses whooped until swollen blisters raised red with puss oozing filth and slime straight thru the bandages, so to, will kids of today do the same and much worse.
The evolution of man rages disgusting and impoverished. Here we are the intelligentsia of the intelligentsia and we can’t even understand our own children, so why not step over a half-dead bum? Televisions, stereos, computers, hi-fi, wireless, .com, internet, intranet, digital funds, corporations, CEO, pipelines, territorial takeovers, oil rights, bombs, civilian casualties, food-drops, lies, deceit, destruction, reconstruction, give to us for we are the takers and rulers of life... The great men judged great by the achievements of their viciousness and everyone wants remembering, to go down with their name scrawled on the scrolls of time. People go through lengths for remembrance, even death.

In the alley, things happen.
In the alley, cats breed as though the world ends tomorrow.
In the alley, bums get stabbed.
In the alley, the stars are bright, tell stories.
In the alley, metal barrels are full of fire.
In the alley, blood stains the ground.
In the alley, screams go off into the night.
In the alley, a man relieves himself and sighs.
In the alley, the stench is okay, so long as the coroner stays away.
In the alley, the sex seems preternatural.
In the alley…

Broadway shows never consider the dead bum.
Nobody knows about him.
He’s dead.
His alley cats are also dead.
They died of malnutrition.
Pretty soon, it all catches up with us.
The fast lane.
Living insane.
Dying like a rock star.
Everyone wants to be remembered.
Even the bum.

The alley wants to be remembered.
The world wants remembering,
as a beautiful thing, as an immoral being,
as a manifestation of everything—good, bad, and indifferent—as
you and me.
The alley needs remembering.
The cat in garbage can is always remembered.

There was a time when the world was kind. There was a time when the world was not so cold. Here I lay wounded and fading. Who will remember me? I am but a mere bum and scavenger, decadent and fruitless. Why do I deserve remembrances? I have done nothing prolific or profound. I was neither vicious nor commanding thus warranting no greatness among great men. I did have a life once, a wonderful life with a mother and father whom cared for me and raised me well. They are long deceased and yet I remain, if not for awhile, remembering them, living through them, only with worse luck. The struggles and the mayhem, the madness of tomorrow, the sadness of yesterday, the torment of a man in rags. I have seen many a great thing and many a poor substitute for greatness. Have I lived wonderfully? Most would disagree. I do not own the material jargon of the wealthy or the items of the working class. Material possessions I have none but the clothes on my back and little memorabilia of regret stuffed in a ratty old wallet, misplaced somewhere, either lost or stolen. The cold has gotten colder. The rain has stopped. The blood trickling away, my life, my essence. If I only did this or that, got the job, finished college, saved away, lived the life everyone lives, sacrificed freedom, tossed away individualism, never picked up the needle, stayed inside my mother’s womb; never live never die. So it is and so it shall be, that freedom was the death of me. I say this now to the world out there that you shall get no apology from me. Why should I apologize for breaking your chains of slavery, for living life my own way, for not listening to you, for experimenting with the fruits of your offerings; for I have sipped your fine wines, eaten your prime cuts, embellished in your slanderous tongues and I left it all for you. I gave it back. So then, what of sorrow? I know it. I’ve lived it. I am it.

In the alley, everything changes, from one moment to the next.
In the alley, there are no regrets.
The stench remains as it always was…
true.

The rain tries to wash away the years,
but in the alley, it’s too dirty to wash.
The years remain.
As always,
true to the same.

Pavement, air, stink, life, truth…everything the same.
Bums and alley cats, stink and rats, decay and alley cats.
Yes, it’s all that bad.

“Another one, huh?”
“Yup, just came in this morning. Been dead for nearly forty-eight hours.”
“Any ID?”
“No ID, no.”
“Unbelievable. The wounds. Stabbed and left for dead. Any leads on the perp?”
“None as of yet. And no witnesses either.”
“There never are. Give it twenty-four hours then tag him accordingly.”