Kenny’s Lost Writing

A blue folder rested on the mud in front of me. I picked it up to investigate. Fifty yards behind me stood a growing homeless encampment tucked back in the willows of Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. Its character grows more sinister every day.

The folder contained multiple pages of notebook and unlined legal-size paper with handwriting, some of it outlined with colored pens. The writing itself was mostly legible and contained garden variety grammatical errors and odd capitalization.

I surmised they were poems, fragments of poems or perhaps lyrics to unfinished songs and must have come to rest on the mud not long before I discovered them because they were not damp and everything else was. I started reading at random and instantly determined they were written by a young man because everything written was about a lost love for a young woman, a desire to reclaim that love, or recall it with romanticism or quite possibly delusion.

That I found the folder while walking with Elmer the husky down a Coos Bay beach at six in the foggy morning on a weekday should have surprised me. It did not. I somehow have developed a knack (skill?) of finding lost or abandoned writing by homeless people in Oregon. Could be Portland. Could be Klamath Falls. Could be Coos Bay. I’ll find it and relish the finding.

It’s always thrilling to make such a discovery perhaps because I keep thinking I’m going to come across a work of literary genius one of these days or better yet, a cry for help that I can act upon.

How did I know this particular Coos Bay discovery was written by a homeless man? I just knew and also knew I was lucky to have found it when I did: another 15 minutes and the incoming tide would have swamped and destroyed it.

How it came to be there, I would never know. Initially, I thought to leave the folder atop of large piece of driftwood. The writer might come searching for it. Or perhaps the writer discarded his poems on purpose with serious poetic panache. Let the sea sweep them away. Maybe I had no business removing them from their possibly watery grave.

No. No. No. I was not leaving the collection behind. I was taking it home with me and would read every word and bring something of them to the larger world. This has always been my forte and favorite role as a writer: finding lost, abandoned, obscure or entombed writing (and stories) and get it out to the world by any means necessary. It pays nothing but rewards in so many ways.

I might have read all the writing right there, but Elmer started attacking me, the tide was rolling in, and we had to get moving.

Back home, I read everything twice. Before I share some of the poet’s work, a few observations/questions:

His name is Kenny. I know this because included with the writing was a printout of his prescription medications recently picked up from a medical center. (There was no address or phone number or I would have called him.) The printout also informed Kenny he would no longer be able to refill the prescriptions at this particular medical center; he must find a primary care physician. That a man in Coos Bay is taking five Medicaid-funded, Oregon Health Plan prescription medications to help keep him alive but is also homeless (and a poet) surely says something remarkable about this nation, but I don’t seem capable of putting it into writing here.

Kenny made multiple revisions to his writing and all the revisions improved the poems.

He had an interesting way of mixing point of views within a poem/song. Was it intentional?

Why was the list of prescriptions with the poems? Maybe Kenny recognized the list as a modern American poem, a masterpiece of the corporate and pharmaceutical banality that distinguishes the names of modern drugs.

Proventil

Norvasc

Augmentin

Synthroid

Zestril

Flomax

Some of Kenny’s standout lines sounded like material for some good country songs. My favorite riffs:

Never did I say this love was not true cause your body laying the way you do.

Pleasant dreams inside her eyes

cause without you Babe I would not know life

I said without you Babe

I would not know life

Pleasant dreams insider her eyes

cause without you I’d be lonely tonight

She’s coming in all fours tonight

She’s coming in all my doors

She said what that photo of us really says

And without a doubt, the best line, sheer gold:

Harden my heart with the wood you find on the floor

That is grade A country music!

In all probability, someone living in the encampment knows Kenny. Kenny may even live there himself.

My mission: Operation Return Lost Poems. There is hope for a homeless man if he’s writing about a lost love.