I’m tired of navigating
one-way streets,
waiting on lights
to change for me.
I’m tired of the homeless
glaring around
for guilt or shame
in my disciplined life.
The pitiful people
can glare at the sovereign sun
and imagine bravery
is mere avoidance.
The richest treasure in life
is intimacy:
no glaring streets,
no restraining lights.
Post Script
The homeless in this poem are not people without houses. Home can also be an inward place: the quiet capacity to remain with oneself without immediately searching the world for permission, accusation, or escape.
All of us can become homeless in this sense. We may move capably through our days while feeling estranged from our own lives. We wait for signals to change. We look outward for guilt and shame. We ask other people to carry feelings for which we have not yet found a place within ourselves.
The anger in this poem belongs to that estrangement too. The speaker is tired of being watched and judged, but his exhaustion shows how difficult it is to remain inwardly at home while feeling surrounded by judgment. Even discipline can become another guarded shelter when peace has not yet arrived.
The sovereign sun offers another kind of presence. Its sovereignty is not domination. The sun does not glare back, defend itself, or wait for permission to shine. It illuminates the world without requiring the world to approve of it.
Reading the poem now beside T. S. Eliot’s East Coker, I hear home as something more than a place we possess or a point to which we return. We leave it, lose it, and sometimes discover it again at another depth. The inward journey does not end in isolation. It makes a deeper meeting possible.
That is where this poem finally wishes to go. Beneath its frustration is a longing for intimacy: to meet another person without imposed directions, moral traffic signals, or the searching glare of judgment. To be at home within oneself, and therefore able to welcome someone else.
Image credit: The Honeymoon Suite at the Zane Grey Pueblo Hotel, Catalina Island, California. Photograph by Joseph E. Patterson.
Primitive Joe 