Tonight, this amorphous faith in chaos
lives inside me the way the luminance
of street lights lives inside the night mist.
This ribbon of hot mix asphalt flowing
to the center of town is scored with potholes
and train tracks the city leaves alone
even though there are no more trains.
Down past the stench of the diesel tanks
past the scrapyards and towering heaps
of rusting metal and the power station past dark
where they’re just getting ready to juice up the moon,
downtown opens like the palms of an old midwife.
Down under the bus shelter on Dorrance a man
is changing his pants on a bench,
gauze bandage over most of a bony shin.
The friend sitting beside him
looks big as a truck. Clusters of pretty
young club girls walk by as if
there’s no one there, heads thrown back
and laughing their way deeper
into another night when every kind of love
plays dangerous games with the dark. Some singer
in a cover band not far off is belting
Christine McVie badly out of tune.
I spot Baboucah weaving up the sidewalk
wearing too many coats as usual
because no one gets to leave what they own
back at the shelter. The hood
obscures his face but I know that walk
like a voice from the past. It feels good
to know he’s alive and in motion
since the last time I saw him he told me
the hard parts of sidewalk life were coming up
against his expiration date.
But still I love these streets and all the random sorrows
that curl up to sleep in their shadows
as I pass through the city
like the vapor trail of a howl.
This existential romance
always ends at the outskirts of town.
Click here to read Jon Lavieri on the origin of the poem.
Image by -ocean on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Anthropology of a Small City - August 21, 2026