Sharing

The squat, it was this grand-ole house from the way back whens of the Fillmore District, back when it was a African-american neighborhood, jazz flowed through the air while the lingering rhythms of gospels echoed down the streets from the local Baptist churches then, well this house was a lingering relic from those days, it was recently sold by the Baptist church that owned it to the replacement apartment complex owned by a faceless corporation which turns old neighborhoods into petty boogie yupitized nouveau riche hoods, the house was grand for a squat it was like a paradise to a squatter; running water, electricity and heat, it was the “MANSION”.

So the Mansion had become like a magnet to the cities hipster homeless community, a place to hang out and crash outta the weather which in it’s usually dreary San Francisco winter of endless rainstorms hung over the city. Rain is different when your homeless it’s not something you step outta it’s something you are drenched in it is omnipresent because when your homeless there is no home to step into outta the rain. So the Mansion was are place to step outta that winter. It was dry, and being dry and being homeless is rarely a association that travels together. Being warm, and dry is even rarer. And that is what it was like at the Mansion so usually people there were happy. Most of us squatters at the Mansion were people that would still be homeless even if we had regular full-time jobs rather then the beat around jobs we picked up via various means. For the whole of us were of the mind that work was oppressive when it is done for a capitalist boss and being poor people that was what work meant. Often people would say, “Why don’t you all just get jobs?” And we would look at them as though one had asked why not just be a slave. For work is that to us, a cheaper form of slavery, so that you can get more things that the boss tells you to have to be happy meanwhile being totally unhappy unless watching hours of television is somehow a replace meant for true joy. “But how will you survive?” the mainstream asks us. And we have obviously found many a way to survive in even industrialized mega cities like San Francisco. There is always a dumpster at the corner market with edible delights thrown away solely because it’s fringes look a little wilted. Always a soup kitchen like Martin De Porres that will give us nourishment or a Food Not Bombs food sharing with all the idealistic anarchists and leftists that stroll outta their apartments to show solidarity with us, but even some of the Food Not Bombers themselves are us, like R and R, the couple that lived in the corner room overlooking the driveway in the Mansion. Me and Yellow Flower would often go to their room to socialize after having sex in my room, the corner room was the de facto social parlor of the squat, everyone would be sitting around some dim candles in the middle of the furniture less room talking quietly thinking that the noise would alert neighbors to people living in the abandoned house next door.

Yellow Flower didn’t officially live at the Mansion anymore, she had moved on to “respectable” housing by paying rent for a room that was actually in worst physical condition than her room at the squat. Yellow Flower was an amazing young womyn, she had crazy red dreds that dangled before her child like face that had brown eyes punctuating the sloping beauty of her cheeks, those cheeks would give way to a glorious wide grin as she laughed and that was probably one of the first things you noticed about Yellow Flower was that verbose laugh that echoed through the empty halls of the Mansion. I remember her the first time she came to the Mansion, a dog in tow and two other womyn along with her. They all were desperate for a place to crash and had ended up at the Mansion as a last ditch effort for shelter. Her dog barked at me as I opened the door surprising everyone in the darkness. The dogs bark more a concern then anything else she said that the dog is well behaved usually so I let it slide and showed her were she could sleep. The Hippie Sisters joined her, they were just passing through, like Yellow Flower, on their way to somewhere else, some better time, some more enduring relationship. It didn’t take long for me to fall madly in love with Yellow Flower eventhough it would be much longer before I actually told her that I was in love with her. I think she thought I was a strange person in the beginning, to this day I still do not know why she loved me as much as she did to put up with me as much as she did for a period of time. Life and being homeless are full of such mysteries, like the mystery of when a cop is going to be nice or be mean it is arbitrary and beyond rationalization.

Life was so very beautiful during the time of the Mansion compared to now, now I am alone squatting a piece of forest tucked away in a San Francisco hillside where developers have not yet learned to climb. Yellow Flower disappeared from my life our last bitter words screeched on a cold street in Boston after we left San Francisco because are home had been taken away via eviction. Now everything is cold and lonely. The warmth of the Mansion has been replaced by the wetness and dampness of being homeless in San Francisco during winter. Passionate love making with Yellow Flower is now passed away and I back to my one night stands of sex with boys because as an opportunistic bisexual the only sex I can have without it becoming messy is anonymous sex with strange men that I know whose hearts do not belong to me and nor mine to them but whose warm bodies feel so nice to touch for an occasional stroll in the sack. Yet I am still in love with Yellow Flower she haunts my mind like a fading memory that refuses to burn up and die away into the recesses of my thoughts. Why won’t she go away, and I wonder if I find some other bi grrl to fall in love with will I think about Yellow Flower anymore, and occasionally I think about trying to find out but then look around and realize there isn’t anybody around I really want to try it out with. The only person in the clique of people that describe themselves as anarchists or radikals around of those people only a boy from back east has my interest and this boy doesn’t do romance. So I am stuck with memories of Yellow Flower for the foreseeable future.

There is something very exotic about waking up to nature in the morning, especially on a clear morning where the far off horizon is pinkish and glowing with an early morning sun. That is what waking up in my new squat, a natural outdoor patch of wilderness, is like. Currently there is a blossoming budding tree with small white pedals blooming in on it’s branches, a wind blows a swarm of small white pedals fall to the ground. Some of them land on my sleeping bag and I sit there thinking how beautiful that is and I understand more what the primitivists are talking about when they claim the end of civilization is necessary. If civilization is not waking up to small white pedals falling onto them then civilization is missing something or maybe the original point of life, not that I have any idea what that original point is other then the intuition that modern civilization is going further away from knowing the original point then getting closer to it. And for some reason this also reminds me of work, what was the original point of work? Work was performed to gain the necessaries of life, not to work for the sake of making more money. Work based on capitalism just leads to another excess which leads to destruction, like the eco-system itself is now being over worked. Work in this system is unnatural. No small white pedals will be falling down on the modern worker, maybe only some acid rain. And rain is not a good thing when your homeless.

I have learned a lot in the year since we all were evicted from the Mansion. I have learned that guys really need to work more on sexism, or at least I do. I have learned that taking medication is sometimes a good thing and some times a means of mainstream society to control you, it’s meaning is much determined by the depth of my mental illness at the time of setting the meaning, in other words it changes with the mental state of my being. I have learned how to live outside. I have learned that there are many excesses even when you have nothing, that even if you are homeless and broke in society you will still generate more trash then the vast majority of the citizens of this world will. I have learned how to survive in the fridges of excess. For what is dumpster diving, squatting and beating around, but using other peoples excess to survive. I have learned to write poetry again, because I learned to love again and I learned to lose love again.
I have learned to listen to Yellow Flower and not discount what she is saying as the naiveties of a young girl but the truth of a womyn. I have learned that you may never get a second chance to listen. But I have learned to share again, and sharing is so much more important than hiding, I can share again.