INSIDE THINGS

I wake, and I smoke because it is mine.

          Last night
I had a dream of an apartment.
It had plants beside the window and a phone.
   Then I woke up . . .

Flowers, things like that, you don't got.
   Pretty things you don't got.
   No pets. No.
. . .
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
. . .
I used to be the happiest girl, smiling.
   Then things inside of me
not things that you could see
          inside things

Gone.  I lost them.  I don't have them
   in my inside anymore.*
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
*These words of a homeless young woman mainly as quoted by Jonathan Kozol in the New Yorker, January 25, 1988