begging does something
to a man — so many kinds
of desperation
in this world and none of them
mine, none of them ever mine
Hardly a week goes by in London without my having to encounter someone named John Wetherell begging on the street. I can’t give him money every time. Financially I could (so long as I gave small amounts). But I owe it to capitalism to play by the rules. Appropriate hardheartedness must be worn. Funny how I talk sometimes about grieving the person I used to be. But when I encounter him on the street, each time I somehow manage to avoid recognising myself. Even if I do give him money, emotionally I ignore this reminder of the person I used to be. Last night I dreamed I was approached in Hampstead by Howard Jacobson begging for spare change. I was just at that moment doing a google search on my iPhone for the line of poetry ‘Go catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root’ which in the dream I felt convinced was John Keats (in fact it’s John Donne). In my previous life of homelessness in the early nineties, it was only very rarely indeed that I begged for money. Often for food though, or for the first line of a poem. I hated selling the Big Issue almost as much as begging for money. And always fell back upon rummaging in black bin liners outside restaurants for leftovers.
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