I got word that an unhoused person, an Army veteran, a talented, nice man, slept on a park bench on the sprawling, leafy grounds of the Military Museum just outside State College, Pennsylvania, so I went there.

     Surely, I found him.  White guy, swarthy complected, hazel eyed, about 6'2, very thin, long tree bark-colored brown hair (...shoulder-length...) fitted beneath a baseball cap.  He sat up when I approached him.  David told me his full name; not normal.  He reached over his rock climber's backpack aground to press flesh with me. He smiled at the mention of my name.  It disarms most people. David talked to me like a man who longed for an ear, not a hand-out.  He told me that he was a painter.  I told him I was a poet.  He told me his life story; how he ended-up on a park bench unhoused.  He cried. I was at a loss for words.

     It was over a woman; his ex-wife, he said.  I knew there was more to the story, of course, (...some drug-use was in his younger days and currently unmedicated mental illness...) but I didn't push the conversation.

     I learned where to find David's parents, and they lived just a few miles from me, and that's when I got the fuller story.  David checked-out on life because of his ex-wife; a brutal divorce which stripped him of custody of his boys. He never saw them again, and David pretty much made the streets his home thereafter. Mom and Dad Garancosky brimmed proudly showing me David's potential as an aside from his past, and they led me down to their well-lit basement.  I gasped.

     Stacked like dusty old books no one reads anymore or tucked away like mementos in a shoebox long forgotten, Dad Garancosky plucked up vibrant canvas-after-canvas from the corner of the concrete basement floor.  David's paintings: not on a wall where they ought to be displayed and diagnosed, but on a concrete floor as if disregarded and disappointments.  I asked David and his parents if I could sell his paintings, post them on my website, and I'll never forget what David asked: "Why?" he said, "Why would you want them? They are ugly."

     I answered, "No, David. Like you, your paintings are beautiful."