Passing Thoughts

Go on, leave every poor
sickening soul be
while you’re ahead
in the rat-race.

Finders keepers,
you’ve got your
new suits, white-walled
tires, chubby wife
with child. The
life of the damned
through Washington Square
Park, under the rat-
infested platforms
of the subway, stuffed into
the bowels of the Bowery,
cardboard shacks under the
Brooklyn Bridge.

In your head you smell
them, you pass Go, leave
them behind you.

What can you do with them?
You could have been... No?
Can never imagine
poverty, the lucky
stricken wretch that
you are.
Same skin, same eyes.