Cheerless Songs - By Nathan Iverson
I'm not really quite sure how to classify this but i was inspired to write it after having being laid over in Dallas for a bus a while back and how so many people homeless people (looooooots of homeless people) were there asking for spare change. When one was escorted out, another one sprouted up. So I bought an old black man a meal at McDonalds on me and I asked him what life was like on the streets. From what he told me, plus living in a homeless friendly city, I crafted this tale to express what I see when I look at them.
Cheerless Songs
By Nathan Glen Iverson
As rain drizzled over the rustic and rotten portrait of a city, its inhabitants made do with what they had to survive. Even discarded newspapers here prove just as vital to survival, being used as jacket insulation or as kindling for the lit barrels that dotted the alleyways. Here all hopes and dreams are forgotten and lost, and when one rises, if ever, all the dreamer has to do is open their eyes again to be reminded on where they stand. Here it isn't about color, race, or gender. To those more privileged they were are all equally viewed as vermin. Here they relied on each other, their own tight nit community of lost souls that the world had long left behind. Why they continued on living in these conditions instead of just ending it all right then and there, saving themselves from another agonizing moment in life, was a mystery even to them. Some still sought potential in living, always seeking the possibility of coming out on top. Others tied to those who stuck it out with them weather they were family or simply bonded as such.
Then there were those whose future fate still hung in the balance, those who still had a chance to escape the miserable prison that everyone else was shackled into. These are the offspring of the street; children who managed to dodge the prisons society had set up for them and managed to survive on their own if they were lucky enough to make it that far. Their songs sang louder than the rest of the homeless, but few, if any, ever heard them. Not being able to experience the privilege of youth, however impoverished, because even to the homeless, poverty is a luxury that is a chasm to great for them to cross. Here on the streets even the adults couldn't take care of them as a parent would, as they were already trying to survive themselves along with their loved ones. Here they would learn whatever trade available on the street to make it to the next day. All trades for these young ones ran a risk. Some risked being caught and put into the system, others even death. But those were more appeasing than those who willingly lost their innocence as a means to survive. These are the ones who sing the saddest songs of them all. Some are forced into it without consent; others do it on their own free will, but either way every time they trade what is so precious to them for only a few dollars, they die a little more on the inside. Those lucky, or unlucky enough to avoid the diseases marked in those trades, followed this trade into adulthood if they made it that far they were still left off no better than they were before.
It's surprising on how much others take for granted these days. Where someone complains they gain too much weight and others can't fathom enough food to get to that point. Where some complain their food isn't hot enough or their cloths aren't in fashion or their toys too dull and not exciting enough, here these are just fantasies to them. Whether or not it was their fault they sank to this world is irrelevant as they are there nonetheless, sometimes as a reminder to cherish the things we have, however meaningless they may seem as life can offer the darker half when we least expect it.