It was a rough one out there on Turk street that night.
It was cold,
And the first hadn’t come yet.
I saw a guy chasing people around with a hockey stick.
He was on roller skates.
There was a man dressed up as a Friar
Walking in a zigzag pattern across the street,
And a woman with no teeth was trying to fix her hair
In the rearview mirror of a parked car.
Somebody was yelling at somebody about a pencil being stolen.
And that somebody yelled back, very loudly,
“Nobody be tellin' me what to do 'cept my boss at my job!
And I ain’t even got no job!”
Trash trucks were idling for hours making all kinds of noise,
Digesting garbage and masticating things with metal teeth.
People were shooting up under streetlights.
Never saw a cop car go by.
A naked man did run by quite a few times
Wearing only a pair of high-top Converse sneakers,
And screaming, “San Francisco you will burn MOTHERFUCKER!”
A rooster was crowing from the corner at Leavenworth.
I fell asleep to the sound of a fire engine’s siren,
And woke up to a television crashing on the pavement
From a window somewhere up above,
Falling from Heaven maybe,
Like Lucifer.
Only it didn’t end up in hell,
It just got smashed to hell
And exploded there on the sidewalk,
While scavengers tried to salvage its pieces to sell as scrap
On that same sidewalk the next day.
But my building didn’t burn down,
And the guy next door hadn’t murdered his wife
Yet.
I remember thinking how good a thing it was
To be alive.
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