Homeless Choices

Friday morning.
Homeless in L.A.
Time to take stock of my situation:
sleeping on a black-hearted alcoholic's
natty, cigarette-burned couch
watching him swill vodka all week,
day and night, hour after hour.
It's a neck and neck race whether he will
lose his liver or his VA job first.

His whole carpet-rotting, black mold-walled apartment
is a hepatitis petri dish
and I'm stealing his cigarettes,
leaving the butts in a pile on the floor
near his passed-out hand
so he'll drunkenly think HE
smoked them.

My only alternative
at the moment
is to move onto the North Hollywood bean bag
of an unemployed actor
who talks about seeing and talking to
Jesus and Marilyn Monroe
(at an increasingly alarming rate)
while staring blankly at the ceiling
and snipping some rather large, ominous scissors
in my direction
and saying stuff like:
"Jesus told me today
that I should get rid of
the evil people..."

My main source of income---
a hooker I drive
in the car that I live in
to her john appointments---
just got busted for impersonating a dead woman
who came to life yesterday and called the police.

The DMV villain
who sold my hooker the dead identity
cut a few corners
and the dead woman
was surprised to find out
that she had just bought a new Jeep.

And still I'm homeless;
the result of choices I made,
and people I hang out around.
But before you question my judgment,
my friend,
remember this:
I chose you, too.

Tags: offline journal, homeless, Los Angeles, choices, Jolie Blond, cigarette burned, swill vodka, V.A., VAMC, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, hepatitis, unemployed actor, North Hollywood, Jesus, Marilyn Monroe, hooker, hookers, callgirl, prostitute, impersonating a dead, DMV, Revver, factotum, jarvis