Coming home
from radiation this morning
crossing town in the rain
up Market Street across the Civic Center
I listen to Jimi Hendrix in my car turned up loud to
drown out the din & the cacophony of city morning
I listen to
Jimi play Red House
and the guitar wails over the sounds of the busses and around the trench coated men crossing the street.
Jimi riffs over the commuters weaving
in and out
over and
across
the cable car tracks and the secretaries in high heels crossing
wet shiny streets and the bass line just now beat up the
shuffle of a homeless man
carrying his burden of a lifetime down sidewalks busy
with disinterested workers and mothers with strollers pushing cell phones.
Jimi made that guitar cry and sing wild moaning as I tried to breathe in the diesel fumes and bay water to
erase the smell of rotting flesh.
Lily.
from Singapore with no time at all really, left opens her gown and
shows me her blackened chest the sores that will not heal the rare cancer
they say is incurable she falls into my arms and I hold her she cries and in unconsolable holding my breath with nothing I can do nothing pounding me in the head with a mallet.
I hold my breath
anticipating
the smell of the gown room in the morning
sipping a large latte I hold my breath
as
a Chinese woman with her mahogany wigged hair and her blackened nose
rotted out to the cartilage
from a cancer found only in Cantonese women sits beside me curled up in a waiting room chair with a big box of coconut cupcakes to give to the nurses .
This morning Jimi sang the blues as I sat in the gown room as the only woman there this morning without a wig on.
My black watch cap pulled down low over my head no shield for all the
astonishment of sacrifice and worry
no match for the absence of eyelash, eyebrow the soft duff of fine peach fuzz on my chin no more statement of purpose rather than style no more
ode to my vanity than a wish for warmth to come from somewhere
there’s a red house over yonder and
rain pounds the asphalt and traffic snarls
as the guitar growls and leaps heights of fury and crescendo
and spit fire the blues
remain
here
resident .
04/05/06
Saturn goes direct
San Francisco
