The Tenderloin Voice publishes poetry and other artistic works by community members.
This poem is excerpted from Jesse James Johnson’s book of the same name: “Mine is a Community of Misfits & Outlaws.” Buy it here or, better yet, ask your local bookstore to order you a copy.
I came to this place almost 25 years ago my eyes ablaze with crystal meth a single pair of boots and about 72 t-cells. This was back when an AIDS diagnosis meant a quick slide through poverty into a grave. All I wanted was a room with a door I could lock against the voices of my dead friends.
Here we live the small broken promises of shattered picture frames whiskey bottles mirror shards cracked ribs splintered doors chipped teeth tattered cosmologies and zoning laws. The hubris and debris of who we might have been had we not from the highest windows leaped escaping destinies we could not abide.
I have seen the poor chew the bones of those they loved best. I have seen the sick stagger about disrobed in the parking lots of hospitals begging to be embraced. I have seen the crippled lying in hotel rooms staring into space. And all I could do was turn away.
The Tenderloin is a place where the broken, the deranged and the diseased are warehoused then left there until their expiration date. Thankfully, the people have their own notions about how their lives should be. They live their lives with defiance courage and with the freedom of a people who were never meant to survive.
It is in the despair and capitalist waste in the ruins of other times and the fragments of our former lives; it is in the rot that is the Tenderloin that we find fecund soil for our return to the world.
Healing, justice, love, redemption do not come easy to men. They require effort commitment, sweat and humility. They require a second chance or a third or more. No one of us can create the chance we need alone. We require the help of others and we must help them in turn. Each giving what they can and only taking what they need. That is the lesson and gift of solidarity among the outcast and the poor.
See that woman arguing with her hair? See her sister feeding pigeons? Is it prayers they mutter or obscenities? To me it doesn’t matter. See that panhandler with the homemade sign? See that young skateboarder sick for heroin? It is among these, the addicted, the ill the criminal, the old, the rejected those who bear the brunt of poverty those who suffer most the contempt and violence that America rains down upon the poor that I have found shelter, sanctuary respect even affection. Mine is a community of misfits and outlaws. People who defy convention. People who transgress borders. People who push against society’s boundaries and in doing so expand the possibilities of what the rest of us might be.
Jesse is a Chicano/Tejano poet, cultural advocate, and a Tenderloin community member who hails from Austin. A son of the Chicano Renaissance Movement, he is heir to a literary tradition that regards poetry as a force for social justice.
