Roads that should not be

"He got up and went across the room, hands outstretched to the bus driver." Jack Kerouac

I would not survive in a city shelter. I cannot survive with any of my relatives, and Inglis House is the stark phantasmagorical hell only documentaries have the courage to illustrate. Sometimes I look away, as you do, from the tracheotomies, the traumatic brain injuries that crumple our homo sapien signature in an instant. Marie fought with me two years ago. "You belong on the street!" And I've seen those as well. Wheelchair users on Philadelphia curb corners, white and black, emaciated and out of their minds, silent when they speak, and I am placing my body under this steam roller earlier than need be because I do not want to comply with Medicaid, with the state welfare system, because even Linda, to my astonishment, has moved on, and I am still here, with my non-compliance, sinking back into a world I might have been spared in the first place, and social media suggests I buy followers. I don't mind hospice. People have to die somewhere, but nonetheless, institutional paradigms will crush us under our own weight.

I have contemplated the scourge of every dark blogging account, but it would make everything I've endured meaningless, and yet, I need this to stop, HUD regulations, Riverside's Bible study groups and infantile activities. Robert, one of the more challenged residents with cerebral palsy who is close to my age, told me last night his sister took care of me in Shriner's Hospital, when we were children being tortured, and I remember plenty from the ward I wish to forget, but had no idea Robert's circumference was so close to mine, nor recall his sister. "You're happy about it aren't you?" Grinning like the devil. He is mentally retarded, yet this is the language of identity we speak, while I am in contention with a handful of authoritarian niggers upon whom I am forcing no choice but to legally remove me from their premises, such an epic failure for such a mind, penniless, powerless, channeling Kerouac's zeitgeist without the ability to flow with his counter culture mobility. I'm scared out of my wits.