I wrote this poem for a competion you had to write a poem about Home, though I didn't get very far in that! It is really to make you think about people we see everyday:
A Place Called Home
His tent squats
Between the abandoned workspace and a betting shop
Battered by the drunks who blunder through on a daily basis
It was a dirty green
From a distance it looked like a mound of muddy grass
A trolley was placed protectively beside it
Padlocked to a wall
He recalled ‘others’ coming to steal even the worst of things
It hurt how he said ‘others’
Like they weren’t real people
They are homeless - like him
But they are such outcasts that, even in their own eyes,
They are not human
Fragments of grass surrounded the tent
Upturned and left to die
They lay, deserted
Society leaving them to rot away
Choosing to ignore things that are less than perfect
Inside the tent, an old rug
Chucked out from the workshop
Stank of bleach and urine
Pinned to the walls were forgotten people from his life,
Pictures torn in half and sellotaped back together
The most striking, the one above the bed
A little girl, radiant in a yellow sundress
About five, auburn hair
She smiles, while holding a toy baby
The perfect childhood pose
Except, on the left side of her head a small clump of hair is missing
He had a mattress, although rusted springs shot out from all sides
He smiled when I noticed it
Said he was the only one he knew who had a bed
I made a look that was obviously not able to hide my pity
But he seemed used to it
I noted this
Bottles made a ring inside the tent
They were filthy and had missing or uneven tops
On the other side of the bottles were newspaper and bubble wrap
An attempt to keep out the cold winter wind
And add a little shade in hot summers
There were bits of odd rubbish scattered around
It was so depressing
The smell so vile it made me retch
For him it was normal
“I begged mostly, moving around the city in a random form
One time I came home to find everything gone
I had to start from scratch
Find everything.”
So now he takes everything with him
Everyday
Including the mattress, balanced precariously
I noticed a newspaper article
About chemotherapy
He saw me looking
“My daughter,”
He begins to cry,
“She died three years ago, her mother left and took the money”
He begins to shake uncontrollably
I feel uncomfortable
I have to leave
I thank him
Then go
He is a mess that I wish not to clean.
I met a man who lived in a tent
He was an outcast
Even to himself
Everyday he packs up his things
And carries them round the city
To find or beg
A life controlled by small change
But the most important thing I learned
Is the fact that
Where his tent squats, used to be a bench
Where he and family used to sit
And at the end of every day
Whatever the day
He comes back to the same place
As to him
It is home
