Its as bitter shout, across and down the street...
A drunk stumbling over a broken bottle in the gutter.
The contents of his stomach still acrid in his throat,
as his numbed mind tries to make sense
of his version of reality.
You can at least be thankful it isn’t your reality.
You still have your job, home and family.

Your sanity...

He is not alone in his struggle.
But to all intent and purposes, he may as well be.
Indeed, he has no contact with others
(even if he suspects their existence).
It is more than he can bare.
He is trying to understand why he is here.
By this broken bottle of a life...
trying to fulfill his basic instinct of survival,
even if it means just another day of hell.

His anger at the futility has burned out like
the car the joy riders torched,
a street or two back... or was that him,
can’t remember now.
It does not matter.
Just the cold numbness left now.
He knows he hasn’t got much of a chance
... of ‘making it’;
and with luck, winter will kill him this year.

He was a city broker once - a life time before.
But he couldn’t take it - like so many others...
Why was there no one to help him?
- Except the Samaritans !
A mute question,
he knows the answer to, all to well.
Will he be one of those 6,000 suicides this year?
Probably. But who gives a dam about the stats.
It is already too late, after all...
the ‘damage’ already done!

People are just trying to save themselves
from going under...
A capitalist society gone mad
with greed, sex, and money.
Buying that personal dream -
at someone else’s expense.
Most likely your own in the end,
but you don’t know that yet.
You haven’t tasted the futility
or that acrid burning in your throat,
like that drunk down the street,
that makes your lip curl up in disgust...

Its not a matter of which
collection box you drop your coins.
Its a matter of which box
you’ll be collected in,
from this world that has gone slowly
mad
and called it civilization.