Anybody Somewhere | FIVE
A part of me loves the spotlight, comes alive in it. A part me hates it, would rather be the wizard behind the curtain, pulling strings and strategically calling shots with no one to know what I look like with the purpose of helping others in need. I’d exist like an angel, a pure thought, to lead the blind and ease the mind of the tortured that turn in the Garden of Forking Paths every left to right. A part of me wants to sing, a part me wants to write the song for someone else. A part of me wants to write the song and sing it but the whole of me knows better and will continue to hire vocalists. Here’s to Mr. Wendel.
Anybody Somewhere | FOUR
Met with volunteer coordinators at the mission: Charity and Chairman. They are both advocates of hope and change. Chairman seemed pensive, wide eyed at every corner to develop organizational management. Charity seemed transparent, a bird in the hand, has a degree in communications. During lunch, we talked about poetry and publishing, grimy journalism. There was boneless chicken breasts sautéed with steamed vegetables, rice, fruit salad, and cheesecake. If ever the Word is tangible, than there was an example: give the poor nothing less than the best to fill their stomachs while feeding their souls. As we ate, the head pastor took the stage and shook the building with quotes from Corinthians, “Are you of God or are you of Flesh?” He repeatedly questioned every man within earshot. Men were turning in their seats, looking around; feeling themselves, looking around. Some were asleep in their chairs slouched like puppets.
I told Charity and Chairman I’d like to volunteer in the computer lab, teach professional writing, and lead a Bible study. There wasn’t a need for me in either so I digressed. Chairman suggested I mentor. Mentoring is like sport fishing, you have to know how to catch and release, if not the fish can die in your hands. Who’d want that on their conscious? I told him I’d give it some thought, pray about it. He gave me three days, a packet of mentor do’s and don’ts. When the pastor introduced the visitors and future volunteers from the pulpit, my name bounced from his mouth like tennis balls, “Myron Michael…” I didn’t hear Hardy, could be my ears were stuffed with the song the choir sang before lunch. Something about God being wonderful and almighty, and I, too, was feeling myself to know what I’m made of.
The pastor said, “He’s a poet.” A multitude of eyes saw me as a fisher of men or a fish. I couldn’t tell. However, that I wouldn’t duck their stares made sense. One guy grinned, a shifty grin that seemed to size me up. He reminded me of a young man from the group home where I worked as a counselor: the one that would test your patient no matter who you were, the one that would give you a hug while stealing your house keys. And whenever caught and grounded would act like it was apart of his plan to stay indoors because it was too cold out.
Anybody Somewhere | THREE
The overpass at 18th and San Bruno is a galaxy for b-boys and concrete surfers, is spiraled like a seashell. There, tags are burned in brick and cracks where skateboards have been, is a bench for weary travelers. Many a drifter comes here to count recyclable cans, to add up a day’s work. Some shoot through the galaxy like a star, running to get from one place to another. Some stand on the bridge and simply admire the matrix of passing cars. Some have thought of throwing themselves head first into a fast lane of speeding trucks. Some have thought of life after death. The b-boys and concrete surfers are gone. Their signatures embalm the framework of a deteriorating structure. How is it to live life while dying?
Anybody Somewhere | TWO
The voices in my head have horns. My ambitions are not aligned with what I have to work with, they’re much more headier. They’re like bulls, if you slap them on the ass they’ll come after you. Steer you this way and that way to escape them. So I pray, and I jog, for life, to stay fit, to increase negotiation strength with the universe. To work for nothing in this life that isn’t cornered in a pile for me to have. To clearly see the phi of every golden section, crooked as a smile, irrational as a crook, that because its beauty is breath taking, has me thinking thoughts I shouldn’t think, falling face first into a Blues of water rough as the Hudson, strident as the Mississippi, and lovely as the great lakes. To one’s self be true even if it means snaking away from a good thing, her and her alone, for something better: you, out in the open field, molting. Miles and miles I’ve accumulated, drifting and jogging, extending myself like a Fibonacci sequence. This is to that as that is to there, where exhausted sits with its legs sprawled out on the grass, one angled, sweat dripping from his brow like rain. Two months later the roses came. My bike is a time machine equipped with hydraulics and astral tires, aligns with the bully’s of the mind. The first time I rode it I took it past her house—her infidelity is still shrapnel in my chest—then past the former apartment of an old friend who now lives in Los Angeles. There the homeless spit on windshields and wipe sins away for as little as pocket change. Pure nostalgia for the hurt and the healing.
Anybody Somewhere | ONE
The ride from my apartment to the Mission is a choose-your-own-adventure, scenic and shifting, flat or hilly in either or places. The sky is a blanket of blue, showing all its glory, sharing all its sun with the dispossessed, displaced, and distraught addicts, bums, panhandlers, and drifters wrung around the shelter waiting for the sound of church bells and a five course meal catered by a five-star Chef. It’s a good day to volunteer. You can tell when you’re close to the Mission, the streets go from clean to crowded, from green lawns with built in sprinklers to yards with potholes and men curled up around light posts, asleep. Houses become storefronts and cars pack streets like Vienna Sausages pack canisters. Hustlers, strategically placed on corners, corner the market, prey on the disabled and disfigured, slide from one side to another as if pawns on a chess board. In which the rules of the game haven’t changed, a pawn is as mighty as its king and as slippery as its queen if given room to move, if given lungs to breathe death into the life of every knight and Bishop living for today a little lower than angels. There are stop signs many ignore, as many as there are fire hydrants placed on commercial blocks in front of people with their arms spread out and their mouths closed standing in front of a federal building waiting for smoke signals and firefighters. There’s a man with Parkinson’s disease pop-locking up a hill, and there’s a woman with a face red with Night Train tumbling down. She smacks the wheel of a mini van and laughs. She has no teeth.
Anybody Somewhere | ZERO
It was time to put everything where it should’ve been: books on the shelf, clothes in the hamper, dishes in the sink. When my apartment is clean and my bed is made I feel energized, ready to face the day, ready to run the gauntlet of life despite the many poles of adversity swinging to hinder my stride: then they were unemployment. It was a day of cleansing, of beginning anew.
I started volunteering at a homeless shelter and was excited yet nervous, feeling both charitable and cautious; I didn’t know entirely what I was getting into, but knew that I had to get into it like a man knows when his eyes are going bad and need glasses, but first he must take the exam. This is the good work—priceless work—impossible to be measured or calculated by societies standards of what makes a man rich, I told myself. I had something to give someone else; therefore I was wealthy, and who could ask for anything else?
I rode my mountain bike to the shelter, houses were heaving to possess me as I pedaled past them along the way—especially the big Victorian ones, certified museums, beautiful as the thoughts of the architects that brought them to life, as the people who bore them on their backs, blood, sweat, and tears—but I couldn’t stop, nor did I want to.
The Bible encourages volunteering—and since I’m a Christian apprentice, throwing stones at biblical text to test its resilience—I gave myself to it, as best as I could, without ego, without judgment, and without prejudice. I wasn’t sure what to expect, except there was a hunger inside of me that through fasting wanted to fill itself by feeding on itself how a fire feeds on itself to fill itself; to know how to go without in order to go within and find the universal truth that makes us who and what we are in our singular but pluralized lives.
