The Tears of San Francisco
Damn the rain, the falling of angel’s tears.
I pass by shop windows in San Francisco not knowing where I am. Geographically, in my thoughts, I am no place, nowhere that I have been before. I am away, that much is so. Nothing is familiar away from the Hebrides. It has been this way for some months, even years, now.
I go out into the wet Frisco night, buy things and pay for them with money pulled from my jean pocket. My heart is breaking but smiles are passports, to and from strangers at least. I write my name into the hotel ledger. Outside the lobby, a homeless guy is feeding popcorn to pigeons. I observe but I am not here; as sure as I am not in my Hebridean home or writing poems in Paris with Leonard.
I participate in life, most times while in the act of sitting, seen by someone, in a bar, car, or puking my guts up on Polk Street. I am alive. I function. If I sleep the wrong way and wake up knotted, I feel the pain. I drink too much and the headache every morning is real. Proof that I’m alive. I react, I have reactions.
I cannot discern how long I’ve been away or if I’m still in transport. The memory blurs. I sit in the window overlooking Market Street, drinking a beer, wondering how I can fill up holes until they’re whole. After I’ve swallowed down enough beer, gut full, heart heavy as oak, I become a drunken child. Isn’t a child’s…
