The Housing Holocaust Poem by Kevin Patrick II

Pass the third baseball diamond
at legions park
Along the bike path towards
The civic complex
Hidden between the trees
On the public lawns
Are the tents of the lost
That no one want to be found


They live there, in ragged shelters
Of polyester
In their makeshift igloos of
tattered fabric
Living in mountains of debris
And piles of garbage with the remnants of their lives found in shopping carts

1 tent, then 2 then 3 and 4
Now its a block
A neighborhood of derelicts
In our Mayberry
There by the civic complex
On the public lawns
Are the tribes of poverty
Morality shuns


You drive by, or park your cars in parking lots Ride bicycles or go jogging in the morning Go for a walk with a friend gossip for fun But still your eyes cannot see a holocaust in front of you

They are the men and women who cant pay their rent People who lost their jobs cut off from a paycheque broken men without families with no one to love broke women with small children dying in the cold

And their out there surviving day in and out Facing suffocating summers with fatal heat strokes or abominable winter nights with ice in their lungs and their harassed and abused worse then stray dogs


but the worse thing of all this
Is no one cares
Their no longer people to you But a disease a walking plague of pariahs whose crime is their poor and theirs thousands in front of you but still you wont see

And so it will go on and on
The housing holocaust