"Lives in a Dream"

Glad I left
glad you left
for whatever
reasons, not
to be alone.  The
endless climb.
The winding
river that lies.
What I found
there now
is pain.  Old
age pain,
grief for dead
dogs’ pain, a loss,

a nostalgia for place

that never was:  hiraeth.
Let me tell you—
streets are
the same, wide
dry avenidas—
not hard
to get lost
looping around
the inner burbs

during a Sunday run.
There's bums
and gunshots
everywhere. Big
tall buildings
on San Mateo & Central
stand like empty
lunging Brutalist
has-beens.  The light
is the light.
If you hadn't
no if I hadn't
driven out
one early
January to Tucson
another city
of the dead
with its own
drunken insane
poets & desert rats
we'd be withering
too somewhere
in the Sandias.
I'd be a hermit by now
ragged, filthy, filling my bags
with mushrooms
lichen, the
occasional hike
down Embudo Trail

to Smith's to buy
cans of beans,
cans of dog food.
And in your
Glenwood Heights
adobe mansion
you'd be filling
giant ashtrays

made from sun-warped

12 inch LP records
with butts you'd been
hot boxing all afternoon,
waiting for the bomb
to go off, waiting
for some rich folks
that you know, reading,
waiting for the sun to set

beyond the three dead

volcanoes on the Western horizon.