THE PRODIGALS...BRINGING DEATH'S HOMELESS CHILDREN HOME!

THE PRODIGALS
BRINGING DEATH'S HOMELESS CHILDREN HOME
by CliffMickelson
cmicke1065@aol.com

Ah, yes...If only the empty desert could talk, what tales would the wind in the sagebrush whisper to us?

And..

If only the city alleyway and flophouse hotel, the mission feeding station and the freeway overpass could speak to us, of what unknown mysteries would they gossip?

Would they perhaps call to us in the name of our lost children? Our numbed and numberless prodigal brothers and sisters?

Our once and future flesh and blood?

Would they then speak to us of what its like to be homeless in America?
Perhaps they would.... But then again, perhaps not.

For...

Few Americans who have not been directly touched by the world of the homeless are able to comprehend what it is that they see before them each day on city busses and in public parkways.

Little do unwitting members of the emerging North American Union realize that the alleys behind our comfortable homes are just one more level to Dante's street-wise Inferno; and that THIS is the apartmentalized furnace wherein dwell the homeless...

More ominously, fewer North Americans still, truly realize how close to their own front door that alleyway grows with each passing day.

In fact, the world of the "homeless" is a complex and multilevel hierarchal world.
It is a universe rife with violence, death, rape, addiction, petty crime and despair.
It is also home to a large group of people who profess to prefer it that way.

Freedom, they say, isn't free. They gladly pay the cost.

Ironically, some of the most intelligent and talented people I have ever met were citizen shipwrecks on the jagged shoals of this homeless shore.

Great numbers of these faceless men and women are dead now.

Their faces are long gone, but a growing number of their brethren's bodies remain extant among us to stand as their witness.

Many are the current and past homeless who began their journey overtly. They were looking for the "easy way." A quick buck, an undiscovered or unguarded path leading to an easy way out.

Some others began their journey oblivious. Mental cripples, they were completely unaware that their life's train was leaving the station.

Still more, throttled by the addiction of an insidious disease, found themselves huddled amongst Kith and kin along the far shore of the River Styx.

So many childlike spirits, being ever impatient for the return of Charon's ferry, instead daily choosing to recklessly throw themselves upon the mercy of another world's churning waters; preferring to drown alone in a black liquid whose ragged course rages inexorably toward the abyss of night's indigo oblivion.

From 1985 to 1995 I lived and worked in an environment pervaded with participants in this world...this...inverted North American culture!

I came to know that the world of the homeless clings tightly upon the dark underbelly of North America. It is the mirror form and microcosm of the world that spawned it.

All its talent, all its beauty, all its horrors and especially all its ugliness, are to be found here. These vises and virtues permeate every molecule of each and every huddled form found in every darkened ally and every reeking empty dumpster.

The world of the homeless is a hall of distortions; a house of mirrors that cast back grotesque parodies of another place and time. It is the Dorian Grey of the false and shattered land of dreams that whelped it.

On cold park benches and in urine-stained doorways, only a thin cellulose tissue of lies serves as yesterday's discarded newspaper blanket; a sad hand me down of all that is no longer theirs to dream.

In this final inadequate broadside of daily obituaries, their names will someday be found missing, as they themselves are now severed, post partum, from a world that no longer shelters and consoles its abandoned denizens from the icy cold hand of waiting death.

But, the homeless know that the dark Lord of Death is patient. He bides his time. For he has marked each and every one of his prodigal charges.

Of all those waifs lost in the polyglot family of Man, these are his special children.
And...All too soon the long reach of Death will silently gather in his markers.

One by one.

One alley and one doorway at a time, Death will bring his homeless children home.

We would do well to remember, America, that someday sooner than you may suspect, there, but for the grace of God, go you and I.

-CliffMickelson