True, my office is a gold Camino nineteen eighty-two
& front-work’s on a laptop, but there are older tricks:
this knack I have to spy a sham address: figures
pried off siding or the silhouette that’s left
when eight is changed to three; my talent to discern
the perp who hides behind the car or ducks among
the bins or sidles, slams the screen & tries
for silence then behind his gutted door. Some
will wave a gun or summon dogs. Once a rooster.
Once an alderman who menaced with a mallet
(croquet) when his trucking company was sued
& there’s still this lucent bruise on my right heel —
long story: swan shot, tree house, veteran. Though
no one wants this dachshund’s weight of paper
compiled by some paralegal underpaid in Phoenix,
I assure you I will always serve. I am the envoy
(a ball cap hides my third eye). Put me in swift shoes
or wings, at some cosmic door with only sky behind —
black-clad, the Prophet of Xerox, steadfast
bearer of a clerk court’s smeared truncated seal.
I know these streets: the houses boarded up,
the other heralds driving slow on fractured blacktop;
the sidewalks’ glass & fenders scattered; vacant quarter
acres returning now to palm & pampas, trees of heaven.
I am waiting at the crossroads, here at your broken gate
where barbed acacias stoop to shade my trespass.
Source: Poetry (September 2014)
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