(1). On 1243 West Rosemont Avenue
I saw the wagon pull away when the murdered man went by. Cops crawled all over 40 cab drivers spilled onto the sidewalk. Wolley and Yellow and Checker and all the independents. Across the way, I saw fellow tenants, parked and pointing on the stoops outside. The night belonged to the murdered man, a fellow whom I did not know, but remembered when I would watch his huge TV screen cast shade shadows across pale walls in the wee cool of the morn.
Walls painted over once caked in blood. And I never remembered. And don’t think I ever will. Whether it was five or six or six or seven that laid him out cold and still. And though this time is now and not so much then, it was not my place to wander again
(2). On The 155 To California Avenue
Oh the man on the bus with the beard did say, “Conduct funerals like triumphs, and losses like parties.” The old man on the bus with the beard is now talking nonsense; about the rain in our souls; and about the stone in our hearts.
How a dollar bill is no longer; and a city fallen apart. Some will stare. And some will laugh. And some while smile with glee. But how many times do we shrug our shoulders, and think secretly that his words sound a little like me?
(3). Waiting For A Number 14 on 11th And Mission Streets
It’s late on Sunday night and I’m standing on 11th and Mission streets waiting for a number 14 to take me back to Robin’s so we can go to porno karaoke at the Odium, as the poetry show at the Paradise Lounge ran a little late they always seem to do that in other cities and never in your own the one I had originally wanted to go to, didn’t happen just like that time in L.A. last year that’s the night I met Jay Leno and was asked about computers but they didn’t show it on TV and the film was sent to Microsoft to help Bill Gates with his trial.
Three, no four buses has passed and now another guy is waiting too he calls on the payphone to his roommates to check on the (bus) schedule-he is silent, huffing and I try real hard not to stare at the guys across the street wearing leather this is, after all, San Francisco and I should be used to it by now, but I never am and it’s like a living, breathing freak show guys in leather, girls with purple hair men and women wearing signboards asking for a beer or a smile and it’s 50 degrees in the second week of January and all I’m wearing is a pair of faded blue jeans, a red Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt and a brown Sears fedora and I’m not cold, just tired.
It’s funny, you know? Tonight someone at that poetry show somebody recognized me well at least my name, Sid Forest it is the same as the “other guy” who lives in New York whom at this time last year I met on a cold and mushy Thursday afternoon and how arrogance met ambivalence, so I thought at the time.
Now there’s a San Francisco cop who stops his car, getting a good look at us, but he’s looking at a car parked kind of funny at a car tire shop across the street. My feet are sore, as I try not to look at him because I think that’s what he wants me to do and I’d look suspicious and that’s kind of one thing you never want to give to a cop in another city, ammunition against you ‘cause a night in the clink would sort of stink, so I better just keep writing this poem about waiting for a number 14 that I’m waiting for on 11th and Mission streets but that cop turns his car around, drives up to us and asks us what bus we’re waitin’ for we bother answer in unison, “number 14” and he checks in with his command post for after all, he’s just doin’ his duty of keepin’ the peace and it’s nice to know that the San Francisco cops got nothin’ better to do in the early winter of the great YK2.
He was lookin’ real hard at us and all we were doin’ is waitin’ for this bus. I can’t help it if MUNI is late I would hate to find out any other way that leavin’ my heart in San Francisco would really suck after today, so I better keep writing this poem about waiting for a number 14 that I’m waiting for on 11th and Mission streets.
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