I drank two cups of coffee and read the entire Los Angeles Times sports page and two poems from a literary magazine and a short story from another journal, while sitting at the window of a coffee house in Inland Southern California.

It was afternoon on a Wednesday.

A gray-haired man, his face dry and dark and wrinkled, sat in a parked 1975 Datsun pickup truck across the street.

He hadn't moved for hours. He might have been asleep. He didn't have to tell me, he had nowhere to go and no one to see.

The truck was Dodger-blue. Its windows were down. The street's palm trees were ashy. The street was dirty and dusty. The street was full of sunshine, sin, dog din, and neglect -- pot holes and teenage criminals. The mountains were so close, but covered in smog, hiding, apparently.

Two yoga shops
in town closed down.

If I hadn't left the apartment
I would have gone crazy.

6/30/2010
Redlands, CA