The Rooming House - The Desperation of Souls One Step from Homelessness

The smell hits you right away
No amount of Lysol can erase the smell of
Desperation, broken dreams, and dysfunction.

It is my job to deal with the manager.
Because my boss can’t deal
with the drunkenness and drug abuse
That mirror his own lonely hours
Spent wasted with a mirror and glass

Packets and pills passed furtively
By strangers stopping at the door
Glancing around, always scanning
For eyes upon them.

I never have to gaze full on.
I have the peripheral vision of a fish eye lens
Years spent working crazy houses
and drug rehabs. Ambulance rider
and dispatcher filling in the blanks
of sketchy stories relayed
through phone lines and airwaves
and the fragmented stories crazy people tell.

What does it say about me that I always know what they mean?
I keep a dead on poker face, to not arouse their paranoia,
and arch to make tenuous connection with the raw nerve of
Humanity still alive and beating.
The one they anesthetize so they don’t remember
that they’re in this
Rotten stinking place.

The manager talks too much. Poor guy’s happy to be
with someone normal. Little does he know.
He looks upon my made up face, and leans in
Closer to smell my perfume, to study my earrings
And gaze into my blue eyes remembering the girl
He lost when he went into prison, and the mother
Who died of a broken heart while he was there.

He smiles. I don’t think less of him for longing
The hungry way lonely men do. He’s always respectful,
We stand there, two people. Not ideal, just mammals
in one tiny spot on this giant whirling globe in space.