'Take this.' Offering across a slice of hard, stale bread and a thermos of rancid water.

'You sure?' Eyebrows greyed by too many days wandering the streets in the heat furrowed, eyes paled into squints of aquamarines where the sun baked the retinas from too much upturned searching of faces of the giants passing by.

'Take it.' The mouth yawned into a hole, a hole of depth and colour and life.

'Thanks.' Guzzling and chewing and stomach widening to force open the intestines for the sluicing of enzymes juice.

'Your life is before you.' Wisdom donned her masque.

'Noot - not really.' Exquisite how it felt, etchings crumbling against the teeth with saliva working its way across the mouth, flushing bacteria from the gums; a deep sense of cleansing.

'Share this with me also?'

'What?' Avidly searching the shape for more of the wealth already given.

'This.' Stripping off the cloth of skin, peeling back the flesh of starvation, clawing out a bloody kidney, simply offered it across.

'How did you know?' Wonderment creased the scarred facade of cynicism and hope gained a moment in the reflection. His sickness was his shame and the repository for all his imagined sins, his acceptance of life his denial of no future.

'I have eyes - do you see?'

'I don't understand?' wanting so very hard to learn now the secret.

'I have ears - do you hear?'

'Ears - yes.' Hands cupped the hearing, closing the sound of need.

'I have touch - can you feel?'

'Hands touch.' Nerves tingled with life as palm fed itself upon the worn, warm slab of pavement.

'I have my soul - can you sense this?'

'You give - I take?' More, more.

'I give, you receive. You give - I receive.'

'I have nothing to give you in return...' empty was the vessel of his want, of his need, of his understanding.

The man, whose age was that of worn, weary years through stuffing warm his stinking rags of so many, bitter winters, from sleeplessly wandering to find a shallow grave in which to hide his fear of betrayal upon the streets of his youth, of long giving up the road called Hope whilst languishing upon the many, many roads of discontent and self-pity, for an instant transformed into a substance of youth, of determination, with his kidney donatus filtering the waste of despair before flailing inside his human condition of having nothing.

'I have nothing to give you at all.'

'You have already given me so much.' The gift-giver whispered into sound which became a giant became a distance so great until the raw love filled the void and was heard as the roar of clemency to question:

'Do you understand? If so, why do you do nothing?'

Tell me - do YOU understand?

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