They wait outside like it's christmas eve and they haven't
gotten their children presents yet, or their wives.
Their usually drunk, or stoned-always smelling
of the night before, of cigarettes and sweat and the outside.
They race up the stairs to the computers,
where they sit there for hours, wasting, staring at screens,
looking up websites of naked women just to have that
feeling again, inside their bones.
They've been caught touching themselves but can
you blame them?
They can't do this on the street or in the shelter,
so they come here.
They say hello to me everyday,
even when I don't want them to,
and even if they don't want to.
We've become family, almost
 like at a bar but I without a drink in my right
and a cigarette in my left.
They talk too loud and leave their malt liquor beer cans
inbetween Nin and Rimbaud, emptied but i'm sure
they've left drops on the ground, showing
respect for the forgotten writers.
They follow the girls through the rows of knowledge-
sometimes trying to show them some off the street.
Their just lonely and desperate, I tell myself.
Their just human beings.
Ones without homes and families and food and sex
The last closing annoucement is at fifteen til
and they slowly follow each other out the door
like some funeral procession.
They tell me goodnight, they wave, they look-
I think the only hope they have in them is that
tomorrow I'll be here waiting for them, watching
in a new outfit with the same red lipstick
wondering when they'll read a book.