Sunnyslope Morning

City of shopping carts,
Dust-crazed barrio,
The sunnyside poverty row
Where days of bliss and beauty
Mingle with unmoored hopelessness
Like the tubas and happy brass
Mix with the horrific yap of dogs
All the way down the hill.
Young girls sing above the din
While young boys dance in place,
A couple locked in an embrace like a neck hold...
They all speak
The quietest of languages
In the loudest of voices,
Like invisible people always do,
Screaming "I exist" along the littered soil,
The joy of freedom like a firecracker.

Birth comes easy, and death comes slow,
And nothing is overwhelmed by the wind,
It clangs in chimes and glistens in lights
And exhales through breathing grasses.
The dogs keep barking above it, at nothing.
Ideas shift between people
Like the wind enters porches,
Without touching down, only motion
Swaying branches, painting shadows,
A relentless disappearing sense of play.
The cactus wren dances to the accordion trio.
Everything seems to lift off the ground
Save an old man still as a sajuaro,
Staring from his flat brown hat,
Trying to hold in place something
Solidified by his mind,
The skeleton that is king
In a country of ghosts.