Conflagration of Joy

Because there is something un-beautiful about death.
Because when we are dead, we won’t get this kind of joy anymore:
Yesterday, I saw a man on the street, it was Randolph Street, it was blazing hot,
it was ridiculously, dangerously hot,
that kind of heat that makes you know in your burning brain
that we have ruined the earth,
hot,
and he asked me for a dollar, not a quarter,
and I did not have a dollar, I had a ten and a twenty and I said,
I don’t have a dollar, buddy,
like he was my friend, and he wasn’t, he would never be,
he was dressed in green,
head to toe in green,
wearing a gecko jacket, ripped forest shorts,
using a wooden cane, and I spoke to him
because I read in The How to Interact with People Who Live on The Street Handbook
that you mustn’t ignore people when they ask you for money,
because invisibility is the worst thing about living on the street,
because you can’t say,
How to Interact with People Who Are Homeless Handbook anymore, it otherizes,
whatever that means, that word homeless, it should be unhoused,
so you have to acknowledge people to allow folks to feel visible,
everyone wants to be seen, for real,
needs to be seen, for real,
and I spoke with him and then I got in my car feeling shitty but, hey,
I have a car, so there’s that.
In fact, I have two cars.
I have a house that is worth 1 million dollars, or so says Zillow,
because everything on the internet is truth.
I got in my car and hit the steering wheel with both hands in frustration
then rolled down the automatic window and said, Buddy,
because, again, he was not my friend
but terms of endearment are wonderful and I felt there was something like love or tenderness rising in me, I said,
I got this,
and held out a ten-dollar bill
and he hobbled toward the car
and there was so much messed-up power class shit happening
it made me want to cry
but what made me really want to cry
was that look on his face like he wanted to cry
I can’t even describe it
there was an apiary of disbelief in his face
when he saw it was a ten
and he said,
This will let me eat for 3 days,
and I said,
3 days?
and he said,
Sometimes I want to drink but mostly I want to fill my belly,
he said, I didn’t say it was good food just cheap food for 3 days,
and I said,
That’s good,
because I learned from The Unhoused Handbook that it’s good to be positive
and ‘good’ is a word with some joy inside its belly of double o’s
as the belly is the most important thing
and I didn’t know if I should feel decent or some privileged guilt
or some false sense that I was a tender guy in the burning world of badness
and he walked away and I tried to imagine where he would sleep that night
in the heat
this conflagration of a building and bushes and avenues of people with no homes
and million-dollar Zillow homes
and what it would be like to offer him a shower or a bed but you know,
for a bloody second,
there was something I can’t name that felt like redemption or joy or connection or relief,
I don’t know, it’s impossible to know unless you ask the internet
and I started the car
and then I drove down the street yelling at myself in my head
because I didn’t ask him his name,
I forgot to ask him his name.