Just like a progressive ad

I was sitting at the light, on the corner, on the telephone with some tall, dark boy or other when a giant noise came at me and I realized I'd been hit right there in front of the fire station and on the way to a job interview for summer. It was really scary. Also, we all know that I love my silver dovemobile and though its injury was pretty minor and my acheyness will likely subside, the shakey tenuousness of a given moment was not lost on me. Scary. But it makes the world's good things stand out: my good friends, the phonecalls from that Big Colorado Spectacled Bear, my BFF and his get-well Korean food, lunch with dear L-Bo tomorrow, my good black cat-girls, (and even the ever-annoying Shorty and Bronte--my oldest friend in a shrug of fur and some serious mats), my IPOD and its ever-growing library of best songs, the Springsteen concert I just attended and Girls in Their Summer Clothes--a song that destroys me in the best way, homemade oatmeal, golden raisins, good mail (yes, Bear, I know,) and poems like the one below:

Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest I will not be there with you but think
of all the misery we've yet
to romanticize. Think of the train cars
rattling all night like the bones
of an epileptic. Think of the song
your mother sang to soap
and how her words drained away
with dirt. Think of the door
that screamed its rusted
warning each time you entered
and the last time you left,
your life knotted up in a red bandana on a stick.
Think of St. Louis, frozen
in April. Think of the girl
who does not know she existed,
that she throbs like a nerve exposed,
that she drains away
each night. I will not be there
to learn your names
or hear of the strange happinesses
beneath the sky
or to swear to return
but think of your feet by a mythic fire warmed
and the orchard around you
pelting the night with apples.
Think of those immense barges
singing like baleen whales
and think of your escapes,
which are legend,
of which I will someday hear.
And thinking of you
in winter the river
speckled with snow
will not be the slab where your body last lay.

Paul Guest