I can call them chapters. I’ll share this one with you today about how I spent years living at home with my mother and brother’s kids. I mean I was so down and out, and disturbed that I would drink and smoke weed every day, just like the Tupac song, “I’d rather be ya N-I-G-G-A So we can get drunk and smoke weed all day.”
I think I was really just trying to sedate myself, numb myself to the pain and anger and calm the savage beast that raged in me. It relaxed me and helped me to sleep. It was just what I was into at that time. It was a thirst and I was trying to quench it! Life was being, and still is actually, being pretty unfair to me, but anyway. That’ll lead to another version of the story.
My thirst led me to hanging out and meeting other local drinkers already living on the street. I remember one guy named Red. I would see him often out by the Landover Dodge Park Post Office. It was kind of my first impression of actually being out there like that, living on the street. My second encounter was with a couple living out in the local woods. I don’t know what it was that led me through the woods up to their campsite. I saw a slightly beaten path cutting up through the trees, and I was drawn to find out who or what was there.
I did that a lot too, taking shortcuts everywhere, just checking things out simply to be in the know. I was also going to the library daily too. It was my sliver of hope that kept me going. You would only get half an hour a day there on the internet, and maybe luck up on some extra time. But it definitely kept you coming back.
If I had applied that same approach of small increments to my studio work then I may have salvaged that career as well, but since I didn’t, I fell back into poetry. The written word portion of it. It was the least expensive and about the speed I was moving at that time! That was when I was working with a company that went out of business soon after I self-published my first book of poems titled “4:20 in the Afternoon” with them. I only got about 25 copies for myself, before I could order more — the company went out of business suddenly! By that time I was made homeless myself and began floating around, trying to survive being on the streets 24/7, which oddly enough, used to be my address: 2407.
Well, that’s the basic framework of my story before I add in more details, and try to put and keep them in some type of order. But don’t worry. There’ll be more. In the meantime, you can read plenty of my poems on Street Sense Media’s website and catch me on YouTube and on poetry. com!
