How Did You

(30 June - 7 July 1990) after Edmund Vance Cooke

The garbage from the can at the bus stop is scattered near the bench were you sit. But how can we blame you for the mess in your living room? Did things get beyond your control, demanding both perfection and submission? Did your family and friends reject you, or did you reject them? When you don’t know where to find your breakfast, shouldn’t we excuse your dirty hands? The difference between you and others on the street is that you’re in your bedroom slippers. When dawn finds you under the ginko tree, the grass and the hairs on your jaw are wet with dew. They couldn’t beat the demon out of you? It only dug deeper in? Or did chance construe a sequence of betrayals, regret, denial, unwilling to help? Until the more you owned, the more the bags cut into the joints of your hands. Learning abstinence to a saintly degree? Preparing to fit through the eye of the needle?