I have two coats.  Walking through the

downtown mall one winter night wearing

the two coats, one that a woman who liked my poems gave me, a dark blue sportcoat

and the other a gray topcoat that my boss at the bookstore gave me and I saw two men who didn't have an coats trying to sleep on the cement outside the loading zone of the museum.  It was a mild night, mild enough that the sportcoat would have been enough but certainly not mild enough to sleep on the sidewalk and I started back thinking I would lay the coat over the sleepers and make at

least one night more comfortable for them. 

I still have two coats.  I stopped and watched them shift on the pavement trying to get comfortable.  Shift and turn and mutter to themselves, not even clinging together as if they were too far gone to ever expect comfort from another living soul.  I have two coats and they have none, they maybe died that night if the temperature dropped and perhaps someone found them in the morning lying

by themselves but together, frozen dead. 

It doesn't mean anything and maybe it isn't

important but I wonder as I sit here wearing

the sportcoat staring at the topcoat what

made me stop.  I own very little, less than most people and on cold days I need the coats

but I'll never freeze to death, this is my city. 

I can walk in anywhere to get warm and

I have friends who would let me stay with them and share the burden of winter.

How does it come about that the city closes 

some out so absolutely that they die and lay 

at another's feet like a coin waiting to be picked up, the noise and stink and stumbling soon-dead drunks and the endless parade of winners and losers rushing past to a million destinations and me watching it, loving it, dying often with the little death of that love.