for V. C.

The bad dream
I think to myself,
As we steamrolled
The Tenderloin flat
With our 3rd gear
Alcoholism;
Only to watch it snap back
Like the fixture pictures
In a pop-up book
The second we passed

And I could feel the million eyes
On us, curious and vacant,
Like lawn gnomes in the grass;
Only here this field yielded nothing
But what the rest of the world considers to be
Trash.

“The palace of fine junk”
A curio shop at the mouth of the whale
Turk and Larkin,
A mammal without a tail,
You never know when it ends,
It just thins out
Into some corner of the night
The bad dream
I think
To myself
Is life.

For most of us
To compare any-thing
To a bad dream
Is to say that thing,
Is unlike the way the world ought to be
But the fundamental question
Of how anything came to be
Still remains
And we someday will lie

Still remains

In the false order
Of this 80 some odd year
Reverie.

At the Kum Bak Club
Which is more like a comeback
Hammer, than a pub

They serve bourbon shots
In sifters
And dine on egg rolls
And signal the buying of drinks with the pass of a turned down shot glass
And George Strait commandeers the jukebox,
And nothing dies
But everything lasts
And there’s not a shadow of a doubt
That I’m the only one in here
With health insurance.

Tonight I will meet a man described to me as
Always on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Holding court at Turk and Taylor streets
A hero of sorts
His poems are for sale behind the bar
Wrapped in a rubber band
And stuffed in a mason jar.

An anguish to his smile
A touch of deceit in his strain to lift
The heavy machinery of his face.
Here we watch armed crack deal takedowns
Like it was Giants/Dodgers
The count is 3/2

Its 3 and 2 and 1

Then the pitcher in the pitch black suit
Raises his gun
And the slugger yields
And we fill our pitchers
And plow our fields
Which never cease to
Spring to life
The moment we turn our backs

But tonight,
You possess something
That I lack.
You have imbued these men
With some kind of wild ambition
At the Geary Club
The daytime drinkers
The lifers
The drinking dead
Bare their 70 year old souls
The telephone gamblers
Put their slot machine hopes
On hold
To buy you a round
And mad as it might sound
The taxidermied tiger
That lords over the bar
Almost smiled at me

And I may just have aged 45 years
That very day.

What I want to know
Most of all:

When does a night become a way?
And when does that night turn into a day,
And if it does how long will I laugh
How gentle will be the sway
Of this tree in the valley of wineland?

I will place a hand on my heart
And the other on the journal of my dreams
And swear I can rarely
Tell the difference between.

-Published in the debut editions of TENDER-LOIN & If I Knew I Would Tell You, 2010.