Every afternoon I walk through the Stockton Street Tunnel to Chinatown
To spend what little of my unemployment check I have left after paying rent
My purchases are usually fruits and vegetables, and sometimes dim sum
And with each trip, I craft a robbery of lychee from a random local market
One, two, or three whole pieces of the small pink and green armored skinned fruit
Gets stealthily stashed in my cotton blue outer sweatshirt pocket
Taken back to the apartment and placed as ornament on the windowsill
Until later in the night when I peel the fruit, eat its meaty white translucent flesh
And spit out the seed.
Animals gather
'round the carcass
Paying top dollar
to enter
A bronze statue
in meditation –
Gertrude
At City Light's bookstore – no one is here today upstairs in the poetry room,
while sitting in the poet's chair by the open window.
I'm reading a collection by _______ _______________.
Mind at a steady calm, but that ol' perpetrator, Loneliness, over shadows the current page on my lap for a good minute, until I stand up from the wooden rocking chair and
see a tattered black nylon scarf laying like a dead snake coiled on the floor planks,
and no one else will be up here today,
after I walk down the stairs.
Jonathan Hayes and his sweetheart just climbed Mount Fuji in the middle of the night to see the sunrise, and they will never do that again. Now he's back in San Francisco living on the un-holy Nob Hill, or Tender Nob, depending which way you wear your ball cap. His semi-new book-length poem, T(HERE), was released in 2010 by Silenced Press, Ohio.