The Homeless

Even though I am asleep I am not resting,
how can I be when my mouth could be filled with violence at any moment,
I am somewhere between death and outcast,
a ghost drifting through the teeth of society,
but no one sees me as I my stock has sunk below,
I am the unwelcome pigeon.

My mother used to cradle me in a shoal,
just as I am right now,
but things have gone wrong, I never got the breaks,
so I forage and mope between failure and dope,
knowing tomorrow offers nothing but the same or worse,
where was my mother when the bough did break?

If I trade my pride under the nightly luminaries,
for a meagre chance of peace and another morning,
then I avoid the vaults of damp penetration,
but where is the pride when no one knows your name?,
and even though I have failed under society’s nose,
the only difference between you and I is one bad day.

I waste not whilst I waste away,
desperation makes the most resourceful of creatures,
we could all learn but the privileged can afford not to,
the weight of my house upon my back,
has depressed me like a crushed snail into these paving cracks,
so here I lay, a mummy of the metropolis.

God bless.

An arrangement of 4 concrete pavers with digital printed images of 2 homeless people together with a poem for each.

The slabs act as both the headstone and the sarcophagus for the poem and image respectively.

For the homeless home is the pavement, the hard unforgiving concrete which for most of us is terra firma, a method of transport as a conduit, but to them the concrete is a substrate, a place which offers no privacy so they sit or lie as statues or corpses. And we simply walk by.

3d laser scan images of two homeless men printed onto concrete paving slabs courted with a poem for each which expresses the despair and hopelessness of their predicament.

The usage of concrete and therefore its association with Brutalism and dystopia is a statement of the dissolution and despair these people suffer from day to day, and most probably also to their near ending life.

The homeless almost seem to be secreted from the facades of landlords & domesticity as they sit and lie in doorways, loitering like unwanted pigeons. And yet too many of us choose to ignore them and little is ever done to address this growing issue. Ultimately, these people have feelings, but live upon concrete substrates which are raw, hard and brutal.

We need change.

3d laser scan images of two homeless men printed onto concrete paving slabs courted with a poem for each which expresses the despair and hopelessness of their predicament.

The usage of concrete and therefore its association with Brutalism and dystopia is a statement of the dissolution and despair these people suffer from day to day, and most probably also to their near ending life.

The homeless almost seem to be secreted from the facades of landlords & domesticity as they sit and lie in doorways, loitering like unwanted pigeons. And yet too many of us choose to ignore them and little is ever done to address this growing issue. Ultimately, these people have feelings, but live upon concrete substrates which are raw, hard and brutal.

We need change.

3d laser scan images of two homeless men printed onto concrete paving slabs courted with a poem for each which expresses the despair and hopelessness of their predicament.

The usage of concrete and therefore its association with Brutalism and dystopia is a statement of the dissolution and despair these people suffer from day to day, and most probably also to their near ending life.

The homeless almost seem to be secreted from the facades of landlords & domesticity as they sit and lie in doorways, loitering like unwanted pigeons. And yet too many of us choose to ignore them and little is ever done to address this growing issue. Ultimately, these people have feelings, but live upon concrete substrates which are raw, hard and brutal.

We need change.

We need change.