Come walk with me,
step your feet next to mine.
I’ll hold your hand:
now just close your eyes.
step your feet next to mine.
I’ll hold your hand:
now just close your eyes.
Come to the door,
you don’t need your shoes
I want you to see
what you didn’t before.
Feel the plush carpet
beneath your feet,
then notice it change
when the doors go ‘ding’.
Listen to the gentle hum
as our weight slowly
plummets,
taste the fresh air on
your lips,
linger
on it.
The cement is cold;
welcome
it.
Feel the heat emanating
your body
seep through your feet
and into the earth.
The sound of traffic is
deafening;
so
open your ears.
Hear the city sounds
colliding –
a traffic jam of noise –
and learn to listen.
The air is bitter;
find
it’s purity.
Taste the sweetness of the
breeze,
smell the flowers and the
trees,
… breathe.
Come walk with me,
step your feet next to
mine.
I’ll hold your hand:
now open your eyes.
I am the woman
on the street next to
yours.
I live under the bridge
that you cross every day;
not once have I felt
I am not in your way.
I am not vermin
and I am not slime.
You see just a face,
but I have a name,
a
child.
Everything you see –
dirt,
scum,
crime,
grunge –
this is my appearance,
my outer skin.
I urge you now to look
within.
For if you had ever
stopped
and asked me my name,
you might have learned
that my right leg is lame.
That I bore three
children,
but soon lost two.
Not to yellow fever,
or even the flu.
I lost my home
trying to
save my boys;
trying to save them from
my husband’s horrors.
I threatened to tell
and I threatened to leave,
till one day he made
the decision for me.
He took all our clothes
and our books
and our lives.
Then he piled them up
at the door with his lies.
I stepped through the
doorway
to a world where I was
free;
free to live happily,
my daughter and me.
But I couldn’t find work,
so we lived in a shelter.
Then soon I was stripped
of being even a mother.
I fought and I tried
to prove I could cope, then
one day my daughter
got caught in a rope -
a rope that entangled
so much more than her
throat –
a rope that strangled
my last piece of hope.
So I dragged my leg here,
to this cement cocoon,
to hide from my life
and return to the womb.
This bridge is my home,
this bench is my bed.
The paint on the walls
is from an artist who’s dead.
Each day you walk by
and you see nothing more
than a soot-covered,
greasy and
drugged-up old whore.
But I am so much more.
I am a woman.
I can read,
I
can write.
I am a woman
and I know how to fight.
I am not vermin
and I am not slime;
I am a woman
in a society that’s blind.
Come walk with me,
step your feet next to
mine.
I’ll hold your hand:
just open your eyes.
