The Abject Lesson (Ode To Jane Fonda)

On a brutal bed of concrete steps
and sheets of weeping mold, he slept
curled in a doorway which had kept
the city's apathy and cops at bay.
He'd sung wine-inspired lullabies
and Sterno-laments of self-taught lies,
crooned between cackles and abject sighs,
before drifting to sleep in his vomit spray.

A manhole cover hissed toxic steam
and sewer stench invaded manic dreams
to co-conspire their fraudulent scheme
of tangible smells for horrors replayed.
He fled up and out of those memories,
awoke screaming, thrashing, and frantically
clawing at a crumbling ledge of sanity;
his rabid howls reflecting a mind's decay.

Graying strands of sweat-soaked hair
were dripping filth and hanging where
they caged a madness in burst-vein lairs
of rheumy eyes dancing demonic ballets.
He snarled his hate at the alley's blight,
threw garbage at rats over property rights
in a losing battle he fought every night,
then crawled deeper into the doorway.

At the alley's mouth, a gathering crowd
cheered a parade, smiling and proud
of a solidarity that readily avowed
support for the military on Veteran's Day.
Afghanistan Heroes and Knights of Irag
marched to those cheers and a welcoming back
from parents, sweethearts, and media hacks
of a city's choreographed morality play.

Hearing wails from the derelict's den,
people glanced from the marching men
to the doorway and rot the bum laid in,
muttering disgust before turning away.
Some caught his smell, saw clothes still wet
from booze, and mold, and vomit-vignettes,
but missed faded letters of "Vietnam Vet"
on his old Marine field jacket, fetid and frayed.

Except for a child, holding her father's hand,
whose innocence gazed at the shivering man
and at those two words she didn't understand
were this Nation's red-stamps for "Debts-Unpaid".
Her eight years of purity did not recognize
this object lesson in its Jane-stained disguise;
could see legs stumped at newspaper-wrapped thighs,
but didn't see Trust severed...and forever betrayed.