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Hot Sauce on Roses
I’d been homeless for three days,
and had slept under an overpass the night previous.I'd run out of money and
there was some panhandling. Hi, I'm Ray- could you spare some... It was
obvious, acceptable begging, and also entirely fruitless. I'd been hungry, and
when no food was put into me, my body adjusted: 1 was no longer hungry. It went
away. But then it returned two days later. An eating-your-boots kind of hungry.
I pondered certain shops I felt theft-simple. I wondered if (excluding whoring),
there was some service or thing I could do to earn a little more life. I was in
a city 1 didn't know and had two friends with me. They were in similar shoes as
I.
Here
was a definite undercurrent of tactic and technique to begging. It was not so
easy as asking, and there were hundreds of people begging in every mile, some
of them for decades. We could not compete with the seasoned, older beggars. We
were baby green homeless, not old oak homeless.
At one
point, I passed by a nice home just outside of the city, and the front yard was
seething with pink roses. They had crawled into lattices, over the pickets, up
to the front door, curled about the yard mailbox, and they were prone atop the
walkway. They were the impression of suburban gardening, and they were
luscious. They had bloomed minutely, and so were still pert, healthy, ripening,
and chocked in color. They were also edible and loaded with vitamin C.
I raided the yard, as many as I
could hold, my pockets stuffed with the heads of roses; roses in my hat, in my
shirt, roses in my pants, my fists, the petals falling off me like purled
raindrops, roses, oh the hazardous roses. All night I ate their aspirin raw
taste with hot sauce I stile from a dying market. I ate and ate until my guts
were tilled and the pauging petals sated me full.
The following day, I woke and
walked, an incredible man in incredible times, and soon surpassed my way.
Ray Succre is 30 and currently lives in Coos Bay, Oregon, a small, coastal town
where art is sparse and, when it does exist is of a general relation to driftwood, deer,
dying romance, or various maritime subjects. He has tried to leave the town numerous times.
He is married, has just become a father, and loves the south coast. He writes each day and
is very driven to better himself and his work. In addition to poetry, short stories, and
essays, he pretends also to be a novelist and is an avid loiterer in restaurants. He
is between dishwasher jobs and is currently a stay-at-home dad, which he loves dearly.
His poetical fugue theory has been published in several publications and has appeared
in the 5th International Anthology of Paradoxism, and his work has also appeared in
The Book of Hopes and Dreams, an anthology out of Scotland. Ray has published hundreds
of poems in publications spanning England, Ireland, Scotland, India, Canada, Finland,
Singapore, Wales, New Zealand, Italy, Australia, Germany, Israel and throughout the
United States, as well as in many online magazines. He is also a winner of the Adroitly
Placed Word Award, for spoken word.
Ray Succre
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