1003 S Beacon St San Pedro, CA 90731

All the drunks
and the junkies
and the crazies outside Beacon House
could fill tomes, scrolls and gossip columns
with all the shit doing the backstroke in their heads.

Acid washed theories and treatises
on our healthily unhealthy love of sin
and all the other puritanical nonsense
turkey basted into the collective conscious
of suburbanites, city dwellers and the hicks
shitting bricks out in the Styx
with all that old timey fire and brimstone.

Every time I drive past Beacon House,
I see someone new like brother man
in a red polo pullover
saying words unheard and unheeded
to every driver that scoots on by, trying to be incognito. Looking straight ahead attempting
to ignore what could be freestyle raps,
evangelical ramblings or regular, run-of-the-mill-bullshit.

I’m one of those motorists, but not before I pass him.

Our eyes deadbolts for that ephemeral spec of time
and that does nothing to assuage him.
Now there for that smattering of seconds,
there is an audience and I’m writing this,
I wrote this to prolong his exhibition,
his soapbox’s longevity just a little longer.

There’s no rampant urge to go back there
and search him out to Rotorooter his conceptions
of truth, love, good, evil and other such vagaries.
I’m content to have this as measuring tape
for my own battered semblance of symbolic normalcy
in the comfort of this mobile room I pay for.

Content to snicker and roast
as much as to be an empathetic voyeur
speeding away in a Corolla of secure separation,
the ultimate segregator between an us and a them.
The only way to see the world
without ever having to be there yourself,
just a submersible under the tides of psychic pestilence that is wrought like so much sewage runoff. I love what you do for me, Toyota!