San Francisco II

Although it’s all visually familiar

the city only

                        feels like home

In the Tenderloin.

                                    Leavenworth St.’s “got

that home beat,” that

Je ne sais quoi

                        on the edge

of desperation. Transsexual

with a laptop on the sidewalk

purse open: smokes, blankets,

and that smell bathrooms

                                                were built

to neutralize.

                        Sometimes places

are hard to get to because

they’re even harder to get out of.

This lowlife

                        misses

                                    the camaraderie

                                    of abject survival. After all,

smiles are brighter

                                    against

                                    your suburban misery,

                                    Mr. Jones—

where it all happens without you

and my head is the only

                                                incongruity,

since all the places it carries around

only bring me home 

to the cool, gray city

                                                of love.

June, 2016

San Francisco

God Is a Bullet

The bubble of your fear buys you a gun. Your new automatic fingers embody fear, load up, and get itchy. The bubble swells inside the barrel to bursting. The automatic metallic mind in your hand makes your prissy wet and your colic hard.

The neighbor’s dogs bark. They growl and cower. “Kill! Kill!” they bark, for they hate the people on the other side of the fence. The fence is their bubble, their defenestrating defense, the wall between their cowardice and false courage. “Kill! Kill!” they bark on the internet. “We love Jesus!”

Jesus loads his gun. He is afraid too. afraid of Christmas. of not being believed in. of the bad thief—he might be black. of the other side of town. of Muslims who hate his “way of life” crowned by death on every corner. There’s no other way out.

Mostly Jesus shoots his wife. or his wife shoots him (they are not always sober). Occasionally Jesus shoots up a school—but that is his own personal responsibility. Jesus, after all, will live forever. unless he decides to shoot himself—which is the most common use of a handgun in the United States of Jesus.

There is no greater hatred than the hatred of he who would take his own life for the fear of his fellow man.

All hail the gun, lord of lords and king of kings. To call for mercy is to know that the gun knows no such thing.

12/27/2014

Florence