Unclear what path I took
otherwhere and elsewhen --
today I walked Sixteenth
North of Mission and beyond.
All the while I failed
to see it. Until I die
I will remember the sky
was that precise blue and none other --
a faint smear of cloud
above the ornate cream
stucco edifice
of the basilica.
Father Serra's Indian slaves
may sometimes have made do
with the miner's lettuce
Such as that I plucked from under
bent and rusted cyclone fencing.
A forager, I ate it and saw
Pogroms -- boxcars stuffed
with Archie Bunker's bêtes noires.
Our future now pushes a shopping cart
From the Martin de Porres kitchen
to Eddy Street. Normally
I am conscious of conversations,
Of the faces who pass me
but today I saw no one,
occupied as I was
By bits of me echoing
through the singularity.
Light another snipe snapped up
From off the sidewalk.
Smoke while pondering a future
when humanity is ruled
By the shadows soon sure to
escape the event horizon.
We will become an ugly thing, then,
Feasting on our afflicted and weakest.
Fell monsters are coming
and I am Cassandra,
Braving fatal gunshots to tell
others who, like me,
were blindfolded
By the men who drive us South
past Devil's Slide
to that dead seaside town called "Perfection."
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