Don’t Cop Out
By James Norman
I don’t use the word unhoused,
which pretends it’s something we
are sorting out.
maybe this linguistic choice has to
do with the lack of air conditioning
in my van.
I know when a problem can’t be
sanitized by using softer language.
there is no euphemism for a hundred
and twenty degrees and a steering
wheel you can’t touch.
homeless means deprived of a home.
it means they bulldozed the encampment
after a five minute warning,
let the displaced gather up fragments,
make a life in reverse from shrapnel,
and hey, the problem is get a job
why don’t you?
well, actually, here’s why—they bulldozed
my birth certificate.
this woman in the coffee shop doesn’t
smell bad, since she’s a hundred pound
forest pixie as
my big ass ex-cop friend with
a stupidly swollen and open heart
points out,
because he’s still on the beat.
any cop with a conscience never
stops paying penance
to the suffering they witnessed.
there is no retirement.
some of them shoot themselves.
sometimes he starts listing names
and it’s hard to get him to stop.
death unleashes a fast moving water
in the broken dam of confession.
did I mention I don’t get along
with the po,
and yet, he stretches me at the point
of my humility,
so-as I might forget to be skeptical.
our little pixie believes love is the answer
as well but, goddamnit,
she’s covered in bruises
and someone stole her phone,
her bike,
and she just wants to talk about it,
mentions how two strapping men like
us might be the solution
to her problems—& right now!
she really needs that phone.
a hundred twenty nine dollars
to reinstate service. do you know
what a gal’s gotta do to make a quick
hundred twenty nine on the streets?
it don’t take much imagination.
she carves
twigs into little figurines,
two hearts in the feet, for love.
she tiptoes across it back to her
storage unit full of thrift store
furniture she splatter-paints;
a dead lover taught her how.
she tells a story about a place
they shared: he painted a mural
on the wall weeks before the lease
ended. we gotta paint over that
she worried. tell them I’m an artist
he said, maybe they’ll want to keep
it. they didn’t. as she put it, they just
wanted their wall back. so he painted
over it, begrudgingly: they needed the
deposit more than they needed to be
understood for who they were.
eventually, it’s too much for all of us.
this wood sprite wasn’t made for
the desert and her brain is a little
cooked. we listen, but the conversation
begins to break down.
as for Harry, decades on the beat,
violence, fear, right out of a traumatic
childhood and into the thin blue line.
but he sits and listens as if we
were talking about ballistics.
patient, but wary underneath.
he saved some lives.
I see him size her up,
wondering if he can save hers.
always bargaining with these
debts no one earns. they
just inherit… it’s the way the
world works, broken as it is.
I don’t call people unhoused.
it’s not a home if they can crush
all your shit with a backhoe in
under an hour.
home-less.
it means deprived.
we won’t listen long enough to hear
how much we take from them with
our indifference.
fuck being politically correct.
even an ex-cop and a displaced wood
sprite know
love can be revolutionary
the moment we stop calculating
and just
listen,
instead of inventing new ways
to name injustice.
homeless.
homeless.
homeless.
say it with me.
call it what it is.
we stole every inch beneath our feet.
all of us are homeless, but only some of
us have to live on the streets to prove it.
it’s not a bureaucratic error in the math.
no one is coming to help them.
except, possibly, my ex-cop friend.
how am I supposed to feel about that?
later, I’ll watch him and his wife
make her a modest care package.
a hundred degrees in the shade.
call it what you want.
I call it bullshit.
a hundred degrees in the shade.
I call it homeless.
at my lowest, I’m already halfway there.
I understand so intimately, no one’s coming,
unless it’s us.
don’t cop out.
we all have a duty.
we all are capable of brutality.
the news is full of it, every day.
a hundred degrees in the shade.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t
know fuck all,
but I know it’s not worth
lying about, either.
they aren’t looking for a more
humane title.
that’s not shelter.
a hundred degrees in the shade
means it’s even hotter everywhere else.
