Underpass Party

Underpass party

of bums and hobos,

celebrating something

amid the traffic and the

grime.

Four or five homeless

huddled together under the

concrete support pillars

of the highway overhead,

sharing a pizza.

They were all sweating

from the summer heat and

the compacted convection oven

of living under and around the

roar of traffic.

They smelled like vinegar and

fish, but they didn’t seem to

know. They ate like it was a

urban picnic, in one of their

own backyards.

They smoke and ate and spoke

of the days without care, of the easy life,

when it wasn’t this hard, to get

pizza, but pizzeria’s don’t deliver

to the underpass.  

The Saturday night traffic sped by them,

kicking up the road dirt and sludge,

but the bums and homeless simply

carried on, without barely a notice

of the perversion of it all.

It wasn’t that they were happy,

it wasn’t that they were miserable,

it’s just that they were there, in that space,

defiantly existing,

eating pizza from a cardboard box.

It was an Underpass pizza party,

covered in hardship,

but not buried

by it.