Nothing in nature is as sweet

as the sweaty summer avenue walk

through New York or any city

where a bare-chested homeless man

tackles a delivery boy on his e-bike,

then wails away at his face until

another vagabond waddle-runs toward him,

to pull him off and remind him

this isn’t a jungle, this is a person,

nobody you know, but somebody

who wants to live,

and this is how we learn

to do that together.

George Guida is the author of eleven books, most recently the novels The Uniform (Guernica World Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022), and the poetry collections Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020) and New York and Other Lovers (Encircle, 2020). His new collection The Fulfillment Center is forthcoming from Foothills Publishing.