if you just substitute the Bay and the Pacific for the Rio de la Plata and the Atlantic, and ignore the references to earthquakes, this could almost have been written by Buenos Aires instead of San Francisco...
I wish you would follow my streets as they run themselves like hands over my hills, which swell like pregnant bellies, like ripened pomegranates. Devour me. Only… please… consume, digest, and transform to muscle and sinew both the rotten and the ripe: my defiant and desperate trash miners, my rowdy and impatient fist-clenchers, my cafés and their industrious and maternal steam, my sorrowful shrines built about bullet-gnawed trees, my walls bleeding images of struggle, calling out to you, demanding that you perceive and swallow and then spit up some mixture to perhaps patch their crumbling pain, my grim, jaw-clenched-to-breaking warehouses whose doors wince as they are pried wide and force-fed the obese merchandise of decadence, my parks and their pillows of paper and animal mosaic playthings constructed from the shards of dead inanimate toys. Gasps of color must enter your smoke-choked throat and go down smooth.
I’m hungry, too. Feed me.
Dig deep in your past’s backyard and rummage your life’s backalleys with zeal. For I am sunken-eyed, bent-backed, and rash-ridden from clutching too long and too hard to a decrepit nostalgia.
Here: we’ll shake. It’s a deal? No? I’d say kiss and make up… but maybe that’s not your style… too fast for you, huh? Okay, let’s go for a stroll. My dishes never rot, but my sheets go months at a time without washing, so we should get out of this place anyways.
The Bay brings stillness to those shakes I keep getting, which I think come from the stress of too much rubbing shoulders with far-off lands – no, I don’t mean you – yes, I sometimes need that stability that only comes with feeling cradled by loving lands, hands cupping the waters of serenity for me to drink… though I hear it’s polluted.
On second thought, the ocean! Pacific, I hear, but think, hardly; open and careeningly wild distance, easily. The crash and the crush of the liquid chewing rock into sand, the beach bonfires, offerings to poets’ flame-eyed vision and lovers’ molten-glassy-eyed bliss.
Yes. Let’s swim. I’ll race you in.
