Arid

When I was young, I remember wondering

whether the Santa Ana River had he capacity

to become as mighty as the Mississippi.

As I stood atop Mt. Rubidoux,

the gully that separated Riverside

from Jurupa seemed wide enough,

having just read "The Adventures

of Huckleberry Finn" for the first time.

My imagination was good then.

And now, there’s a large white crane

towering over downtown in my hometown

near the watering hole where I drink

with friends after work, thinking they will build

something here. They will build something

here. They will build something here.

12/30/2010

Riverside, CA

You'd be so nice to come home to

A thin-gray pipe lined the space between the ceiling and walls of the apartment. Steam precipitated out of the pipe and dark-green mold grew both a foot across the ceiling and down the wall. It was worm in the apartment. It was cold outside.

It was early December in Lucerne Valley, California.

The only furniture in the apartment was the dining-room table, four folding chairs around that table, a television and a stereo. The television was on top of a coffee table and the stereo was under that. A Nina Simone song played, “You’d be so nice to come home to ...” There was a fire in the kitchen. A flame burned high from a gas stove, the cook handling food in a pan, throwing spices and humming the tune. “You’d be so nice to come home to ...”

-- Apple Valley, CA

11/27/2010

The Cronies, part 2

The hard part about moving on is leaving behind what was comfortable.

And to that same token, the hard part about coming back is getting reacquainted to what was once so comfortable, like that old corduroy blazer that's been sitting in the closet for four years while you were away getting an education at some fancy college.

Since I went to school at the fancy college only 25 miles away from home, I'm stuck somewhere inbetween, trying to remember what I did at home, how the old cronies who still live in Riverside get along, espcially now that all the interesting folks I met who discended upon Redlands from fancy places like San Francisco, Portland, New York and Los Angeles are all gone, having graduated, and reconciling too that I also must move on, leaving the Citrus Belt's sunshine, coffee houses and mountain ranges that I love and learned to appreciate as much as life itself.

As a young man thinking, that single sentence in the preceeding paragraph is my most dominate thought.

University of Redlands Armacost Library
12/7/2010

The Cronies, part 1

It it weren’t for those illiterate

sonsofabitches,

who drank whiskey and smoked

cigarettes on their mother’s time,

teaching me their trade, kicking

blues down the road, like a truck driver

on old Highway 395, then

I’d have not learned that a pauper

should never

ever say,

“Nay,” to whatever

comes his way.