Something Lost

Facing the alley below
this chair in
City Lights
I feel my ghost.

She is the ghost of something
I lost in this city long ago.
She follows me on buses;
into the park.
She avoids the fog
and when I board the plane
she is gone.



City Lights Books, San Francisco. My natural habitat.

And

"Speak of an angel and an angel appears," he says outside of the bar, my bar, the dive bar. And I am only passing. And I think about the angel from the day before, how he stopped and asked for a quarter, then turned and said to the two of us,"You are better than average," and how, "It is better to burn out," like his cigarette,"than to fade away," like his cigarette, and how he left us embracing and how that wasn't enough.

Just before the man outside the bar says, "Speak of an angel and an angel appears," I try to miss the lines in the pavement. It is superstitious. I think of the synchronicity of the day, other people's problems placed against my own ashy problems, burned out in an ashtray, and I wonder when these things will be resurrected to confront me.

My short breath, induced by alcohol. I couldn't have done anything differently and so I didn't.

Time is Money

And she threw a plate at him,
and the next one threw a beer
bottle through a clap of thunder,
but I just chucked a handful of
change on the pavement,
mostly nickles and dimes,
no pennies.