Night

STILLNESS

The streets are empty

Chinatown sleeps and San Francisco stands

somewhere in this city someone reads poetry

alone

alone,

wind picks up, it is cold and getting colder,

where to go? Where is home?

words are not guides they are markers for places

we saw

places we lost somewhere we left behind,

Here stillness is just these wet streets,

there are no pedestrians, even the pigeons sleep

and try to forget their sorrow, their loneliness

their deepening hunger for something

is it food?

is it sunlight?

is it change?

nobody knows, nobody cares

So I walk under street lights, shadows mark my steps

words hide in my pen, they don’t know when to come to life

this stillness is a passage, my footsteps have no echo

no echo across these unending borders of night.