Ain’t no one gon’ choose to live in no tent
Inna park with the trash and the dirt and the cold,
But you fresh outta jail ain’t got one damn cent
And every single place you go you told,
 
“This ain’t no place for you we got children here,
Folks with jobs, responsibility and you—and you—
Some broke, broke-down ex-con. You wanna be near
These straight folk with your criminal life? Who

Would ever stand for such a thing?” So I got
Myself a tent, don’t ask how or where,
Claimed me a patch of grass with this whole lot.
Now I gotta leave cause the straight folk get scared.
 
Spent all day looking for a place, started at dawn,
The city came by and took my shit while I was gone.

*****

D.A. Hosek writes: “The Chicago Sonnets sequence is a planned sequence of fifty sonnets, one for each Aldermanic Ward of the city. This is a rare bit of reported poetry in that I went out and talked briefly to one of the people in a homeless encampment (not the one that’s in the poem though) wondering how he ended up living in a tent on the streets. Then, after discovering that I’d already written a sonnet for the ward that his encampment was in, I had to find a different encampment in a different ward and learned about the city destroying a camp in Humboldt Park and that provided the last pieces of the poem.”

D. A. Hosek’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Big Score Lit, Dodging the Rain, After Hours, Rat’s Ass Review (including this sonnet) and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from the University of Tampa. He lives and writes in Oak Park, IL and spends his days as an insignificant cog in the machinery of corporate America.  https://dahosek.com @dahosek.bsky.social 

Photo: “IMG_2971a” by Elvert Barnes is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.