Fentanyl Morning

A Sunday at dawn. Elmer and I were doing our usual thing through the park. I heard songbirds. Ducks and geese darted around the casting pond. The sky was a checkerboard of gray, yellow and blue. I noticed a tent pitched under a grove of cedars. It hadn't been there the previous morning.

I had various thoughts on my mind: 1) A 13-line poem written by a homeless man and published in the weekly newspaper advocating for the homeless. In “Rolling and Smoking,” the poet, admittedly high on meth or fentanyl, sits in the back seat of a cop car. Everything was, according to him, going as “planned.” He stares out the window and in the last stanza sees sober people and...

Haters look right at me can watch

Me as I smoke them because

I still don't give a single

fuck.

It was easily the most delusional poem I've ever read but also quite remarkable because it perfectly explains what many homeless people (at least in the poetry of this newspaper) feel about people living in homes: The housed people don't get it. We living on the streets do. You judge us and don't know shit.

It's very much like many of the poems written by prisoners I've read over the decades. They're incarcerated and no more about real life than someone who is free and hasn't committed a violent crime.

Whoever is guiding these homeless poets in Portland, or teaching them, doesn't know what they are doing. They are not challenging the poets and THEIR ASSUMPTIONS. The teacher can't go there, won't go there, and therefore has little business teaching or even encouraging homeless poets how to write poetry.

I have never read a poem in this publication where the homeless poet explores the reasons for becoming homeless or leaving a needle on a sidewalk or ruining a riparian area of a salmon bearing stream or running a noisy generator at all hours in front of a residence housing an 80-year-old woman living alone or what he thinks about his estranged son or granddaughter he hasn't seen in decades. References to late stage capitalism in a poem don't cut it either.

Nevertheless, I applaud the newspaper for publishing poems written by the homeless. Every now and then a gold nugget works itself through the sluice and shines a light on something eternal.

Something else was on my mind: 2) I had heard through the neighborhood grapevine that a 70-year old woman, a former dominatrix, was now homeless in the area, and has decided she wants a return to her kinky past to help ends meet on the streets.

What to make of that? It was well beyond my reckoning. A poet should take it on, perhaps with a limerick. There once was dominatrix from Nantucket...

Elmer and I left the path and walked toward the vehicular homeless encampment. On our approach, I counted seven rigs, three of them new from the previous morning. It's a fluid community. I'll see the same rusted sedan or ancient delivery truck for a week, then they vanish, only to reappear in a week or month. Occasionally I'll see a vehicle and then never see it again. One current resident lives out of an Acura with a new shepherd puppy.

There was one mainstay: a vehicle formerly known as an Oldsmobile SUV, white, battered and shattered, taped and tarped. It hadn't moved in well over six months and was never moving again unless a truck towed it away. Sometimes the Oldsmobile was surrounded by heaps of trash; other times, the area looked neat and tidy. I had never seen the occupant. Sometimes notes appeared on the driver-side window, but I never ventured over to read them. Maybe one day.

A figure stood outside the open front door of the Oldsmobile's passenger's side.

The figure's back was to me. I made him for a man. He was wearing baggy tan pants half way down his ass and mismatched boots. I couldn't see his upper body.

Why?

My best explanation follows:

The man wore a shiny reflective visor commonly placed inside vehicles' front windows as a kind of poncho. He had cut a hole in the visor a bit larger than the size of his head. About a quarter of his head protruded from the hole. He had curly hair. Wisps of smoke rose from the hole, much like smoke rising form a tepee fire. He swayed as he stood there. It appeared as if his knees might buckle. I deduced: he was smoking fentanyl or methamphetamine or a combination of both and using the visor to trap the smoke and vapor to produce a better high.

I sense my description of this image is wholly inadequate, but it feels almost impossible to describe here with words because I had never seen anything like it before.

A thought occurred to me: if the man falls over, what do I do?

Elmer and I didn't tarry at the encampment. We headed for the creek. On the way, we passed a canned ham trailer from the 60s marooned on a side street. It was covered in plastic, duct tape, cardboard and blue tarps. Both ties were flat. A tent and piles of possessions blocked the sidewalk in front of the trailer. This derelict rested seven feet away from a unit of an apartment building.

On our way home, I decided to walk past the Oldsmobile again and see what was going on since our initial observation of 20 minutes ago. Why not? I had nothing else to do all morning or the rest of the day for that matter.

The man still stood there, wearing the visor, swaying. But the smoke had disappeared.