Featured Young poet: Missa Silvera, age 11
The wharf, tourist coated restaurants,
food smells, music from behind doors
and sounds of money buying memories.
We, behind on dark sand,
looking for the beer drinker's toilet
hailed from the under shadows
by crouched voices wanting cigarettes.
In the low places on damp sand
they lived below happy tourist's heels.
Their home was ours for the price
of a few smokes. So we went for wine
some of us, some of them
and someone with money.
Under the pier, the passing of the jug
a sacrament of night encounters
with Jack, who loved heroin
reverend Billy, who loved god
and maybe other things less grand
and two faceless voices
unreal in cramped blackness
except for the glow of borrowed smokes
orange gestures punctuating mumbled words.
Talk of wine and distant homes forsaken
of exotic drugs and of the city
while looking out from the under place
at the view of Berkeley
shimmering on the inky water.
The offering of night's hospitality--sleeping
bags
no rent, morning coffee, lights, or doors--declined.
We, and our appointment with warmth
across the hill in a place near the sea.
We,, from out of nowhere at nine,
dissolving like spirits at midnight.
And Jack who loved heroin
and Billy who loved god
together under the impersonal wharf
as if everything becomes the same
rivers flowing to that inky bay, now
ebbing silently in the fuzzy glow of Berkeley.
Distinctions blured by wine and darkness
and the urgency of a night's appointment.
Then after good-bye, we--drunk--lost in
Oakland
looking for a gas station, sharing
our last cigarette.
