The Disgarded
They gather where the buses sigh
and the gum is older than hope,
collared by flickering streetlights
that make everyone look halfway erased.
A man with a bent spine feeds pigeons
like they owe him rent.
A woman laughs too loud at nothing,
her grocery cart rattling with kingdoms
made of cans and string.
Nobody planned on this—
not the kid with the wandering eyes
who still hums cartoon songs,
not the vet who talks to ghosts
that outrank him.
They move like paperwork
that slipped behind a desk in 1987,
yellowed, misfiled,
still technically alive.
I’ve shared cigarettes with them,
cheap wine,
the kind of silence that doesn’t ask questions.
You learn things down here—
how pride can outlive teeth,
how kindness sometimes shows up
wearing the wrong shoes,
how the world doesn’t hate you
so much as forget your name
mid-sentence.
They are called broken, slow, ugly,
burdens, mistakes—
words tossed like loose change
into cups already full of rain.
But I’ve seen the way one of them
gives half a sandwich to another
without making a speech about it.
I’ve seen a woman with shaking hands
button a stranger’s coat
like she was sealing a letter to God.
Tell me again who’s less than.
The discarded don’t disappear.
They stack up in doorways,
under bridges,
inside the blind spots of passing cars.
And sometimes, late at night,
when the bars cough us all back onto the street,
I realize
we’re standing in the same pile—
just some of us
haven’t hit the ground yet.
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