San Bernardino

I

Cruising down E Street
was just the thing
to do
or hanging out at Seccombe Lake
and Wildwood Park
made summer days
a bit more bearable
under the beige heavily encrusted skies.

And wildfires
and riots
and mass murders
took place in that city
of awful angels
all the time.

Trying to understand
the bad Spanish
Whites had created
in "Del Rosa"
instead of "De La..."

Moving from there
to a place
about a half mile
west from where
a lazy creek
fed poverty struck
Native Americans
a long, long time.

All just I could to go
to a better sports-oriented
high school
that the one where I started
freshman year.

We could have relocated right above
the local mental hospital
into a flat-roofed house
of two stories
sharing a fence between
sanity and not...

At sixteen
sometimes it's hard to figure
where one begins
and the other ends.

A bar
down on Third
caused too many problems
at home
too long to count
but making dinner
without a parent's permission,
caused more pain
than it was worth
to eat at a regular time
no matter how hungry and scared
one got.

And my brother
made a path worn
down the backyard
to where a slight ridge
separated fence
from a railroad track
used too little---
only at 9:15
at night

and then he went back
to a redwood fence
with nice roses planted right before it

he never ran into their petals
usually.

Out near the place
where the hills and pass divide
we never buried the pets
in a cemetery just for them

it was still
a touchstone
in my life

especially when you lived
in the shadow
of a puny knoll
in the center of a valley
bounded by Baldy and Gorgonio.

Perris Hill
was a goal
I raeched only to hide
from dissection and formaldehyde
in biology class
and a home life
where only one adult,
didn't cared.

And oranges
at a second-rate
carny/amusement-like sideshow
always brought rain,

yeah,
who wants that
as a local legacy
in the years before
one is seventeen.

I won a goldfish
there once
and there was a slow crocodile
in a cheap pet store
right below
the radio station
its three towers
introduced some temoprray
melodious middle-brow music
into my life.

I see them now
still
and I really
don't have to look hard enough
to do so
even now.

reality.

II

Reality

irony

Newbury, Pacific, Arden, Echo Ct.
Golden, Holly Vista, Mirada
streets of promise
here is in this town

where the vertical freeway
divides the Black side
from the White
on purpose
but of course
no one ever talks about it

plainly
but behind cupped hands
laughing lips
in the part I lived in
one did.

Santana, Uriah Heep, the Hollies
and Redbone
bought at the K-Mart
early musical me
although Mom's foray into
mid-sixties music at Sears in The Inland Center
was....

sincere

although Jeff Beck is way cooler
than Donovan
and Richard Harris was the end
for me
since the yard does go on
forever.

Santa Anas and blossoms
from the lone orange tree
in our too well-maintained backyard
made September
right before school started
a sneezing hell for me.

And the arrowhead in the hills
was always pointing
away from me
while planning raids and war
and death in the arid olive grove
beyond the railroad tracks
near the point at which
two continously waterless creeks
pulled into one
twenty feet below the freeway
that cut the north from the south part
of the city.

Winning all my sprints
in junior high
trophies of cheap construct
even then.

Snow at Sage's
at an age of ten
while in an Oldsmobile 88
was a stellar event then

and even still now.

But the wind-blown October skies
at sunsets of silver, cerise, daffodil, and cornflower blue
were what was needed
to keep me here
and not
from running away.

But the rain
hardly came
I would have liked it
to do so
more often.

A change of pace
from a heat that holds
one down.