A Night in Old San Francisco

Midnight, my Friend– a lazy mind salad circles the melon moon
with cantaloupes and antelopes, with wry deceptions of currants
passing themselves off as ripe raisins, great green words
with nowhere to grow, no proper sentence in which to root
and slyly project a vine of meaning, gleaming pieces of Mom’s
silverware crossing and uncrossing themselves like obsessive
superstitious Catholics, heaven and California playfully trading
places back and forth, dried broccoli spears crumbled, sifted,
and rolled into thin sleek spliffs, neat squares of tofu caught
in the dualism of kitchen existentialism: to bake, to broil,
or ride hot tin foil into the searing sky ovens like soaring
soy kites over Fort Point Pier, at old Baghdad by the Bay.

Tonight was like a Herb Caen day, utterly peculiar to itself
in the same way onions, caramelized, attain a savory sweetness
fit for classic cook book soup, topped with a hearty cheese
Gruyere, a legendary Cliff House treat, Irish Coffee neat,
a toast around the open hearth, as dreamers, drifting,
dream away, the roasted fragrance of immediate experience,
of impermanence, of everything instantly modifying itself
in no time, waft around us deliciously, past and future vying
for our attention, the same attention virtual sleepwalkers grant
to their next step, another dreamy step into themselves, deeper
and further, toasting their glad insomnia at old Seal Rock,
slick seals bellowing in the dark, trippers tripping through
Golden Gate Park, fog horns sounding out of sight, a music
made for our delight, on one more mystic San Francisco night.