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16
January – March 2014
www.deltalivingmagazine.com
Photos by Charleen Earley
over to discover there’s an actual
person among all that “garbage.”
Maybe the “garbage” contains
his life’s belongings. Maybe it re-
ally is garbage. Maybe those plas-
tic bags are filled with stories of
how he became homeless, stories
that I could not uncover within
15 minutes of an “interview.”
I did a Google search on a
“Dwight Thompson” with a ‘p’
and found this poem below. I
have no idea if this is the Dwight
Thompson I met, and if he wrote
this or not, but the uncanny na-
ture of the words struck me.
Dwight H.Thompson
I lived a double life
On my driver's license it reads
“Dwight H.Thompson”
On my album it screams “Tad
Lucifer”
But I went through the first half
of my life going by “Screw up”
I dropped out and picked up a
guitar
I created a famous power trio
My band spent years starving
Until we got our big break
“You guys rock!” “Killer show
Tad!”
When we were on top
The people around me presented
nothing but smiles
And my footprints
Oh, how quickly fame came and
how quickly it left
Oh, how quickly our star faded
from the sky
I designed my own coffin
A cold street curb will suffice as
wood
So long as you have a bottle of
Jack to nail you to it
About a block away from my fa-
vorite pub I choose as my plot
A homeless man found me days
later
When you forget about them
When you play them like a game
“Has-been Rock-Star Found
Face-Up, Dead in Alley”
My last claim to fame
h t t p : / / f a h s a m e r i -
c an l i t . pbwo r k s . com/w/
page/12456791/Thomp -
son,%20Dwight%20H
The State of Homelessness
in America 2013 examined the
trends in homelessness between
2011 and 2012. They found that
at a point in time in January 2012,
633,782 people were exp riencing
homelessness.The national rate for
veterans was 29 homeless veterans
per 10,000 veterans in the gen-
eral population, and a majority of
people identified as homeless were
staying in emergency shelters or
transitional housing, but 38 per-
cent were unsheltered, living on
the streets, or in cars, abandoned
buildings, or other places not in-
tended for human habitation.
While many of us live pay-
check-to-paycheck, could pos-
sibly lose a job or might experi-
ence a devastating natural disaster,
homelessness may not be as far-
off as we’d like it to be. Perhaps
many homeless people made bad
choices along the way. Perhaps
they didn’t.