LANDS END
Headed for the edge of paved earth squealing towards the Pacific,
drowning it out, street racers knife the wind and peel rubber past
dive bars going upscale, Chinatowns, Irish enclaves, Little Saigons
and Russias, Korean pockets, Italian fogetaboutits, Arab bodegas
caged barred and weaponized in fog, failed renamed reopened failed
again renamed and reopened again restaurants by the dozen, lounges,
mom and pop and offspring corner stores, and homeless throngs
hiding, shrinking, resting, sleeping on sidewalks, in doorways, cars,
RVs, behind bushes, in and under trees, cocooned in cardboard,
huddled in urinous foot tunnels leading to the ocean beneath the coast
road, and in the ocean itself, rolling in surf and bones and shells,
blanked eyes fixed with revelation that when you’re down, all
the way down, finally really down, there’s no way up or in to
whatever’s sold rock bottom of the republic, end of its land.
San Francisco, 2015
Headed for the edge of paved earth squealing towards the Pacific,
drowning it out, street racers knife the wind and peel rubber past
dive bars going upscale, Chinatowns, Irish enclaves, Little Saigons
and Russias, Korean pockets, Italian fogetaboutits, Arab bodegas
caged barred and weaponized in fog, failed renamed reopened failed
again renamed and reopened again restaurants by the dozen, lounges,
mom and pop and offspring corner stores, and homeless throngs
hiding, shrinking, resting, sleeping on sidewalks, in doorways, cars,
RVs, behind bushes, in and under trees, cocooned in cardboard,
huddled in urinous foot tunnels leading to the ocean beneath the coast
road, and in the ocean itself, rolling in surf and bones and shells,
blanked eyes fixed with revelation that when you’re down, all
the way down, finally really down, there’s no way up or in to
whatever’s sold rock bottom of the republic, end of its land.
San Francisco, 2015