H-Boy “Homeboy” Poet is a towering slender young man with a few whisks of grey in a curly black beard. His dark unblemished skin is carefully wrapped in a head scarf. His hands are strong with pulsing veins. He wears the clothes he wore last week and the week before, almost never changing.
A transplant from the Bronx, he speaks softly and has been living on streets for three years. He writes tiny poems for donations of “whatever people will give.” For him living homelessness is “just another challenge for me to get through.”
A few days after Christmas he is waiting for a bus near Franklin Park after most of the men have left to get out of the cold. He offers me a look at his latest Haiku which he’s cut from paper into two by three squares. But as he takes out his folder he drops it and the brisk wind steals it. The poems bolt down 14th street among furious waves of leaves. “Don’t worry about it,” he says calmly in his heavy NY accent, “someone will find it and read it.” I grab a few of his poems anyway, at least what I can from the street. His poems are tiny descriptions of seasons of street life.
One poem reads,
Winter Love,
As I read it he says, “I had a girlfriend but after three days she got pissed and left.” He says he “expected her to leave soon,” but doesn’t say why.
“Women survive on the streets easier than men. They have men to take care of them.” But there are few women out on these streets. A look around and most of the homeless out here in Franklin Park are men.
H-Boy poet is considerate and gentle and though the streets should have broken him, they have not. He is at Zen-like peace within his realm. He is shy and doesn’t speak much of his past or expectations of the future.
After Christmas the caravan of vans, cars and Samaritans slows. Some of the extra clothing and bags remain on benches by people who left them. Those who have brought clothing or food intended for it to help those in need. But not everything gets used.
Those who remain here are for whatever reason, stuck in an unending recession, left out of the American dream. They want to be off the streets but without the means or ability to make it, their journey will not be easy and time for them passes as Panama says, “a day at a time.”
H-Boy Poet catches his bus towards the shelter and, like the wind, is gone.
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