James H Duncan

Little Mexico


little Mexicali corner house
with your big orange life pouring
out the bay windows
into the garden yard, corner lot,
hidden moon but stick-bench-swing
swaying in the night anyway

you’ve a life your own with no one
in sight, no sounds but a scuffled
shoe, two of them walking down the middle
of the street and pausing to stare
and yearn for swarthy south California
nights where the black big-eyed cats
would slink out of the darkness
to the sound of long-running trains
hollering in the goodbye midnight horizon

but this little paradise house with yellow
tiles lining the patch of kitchen seen
through the window, this house here is
so far away from the heat of the train whistle,
it’s stuck in little nowhere upstate New York
under the somnolent April moon, giving
off the dream-scent of long past nights
never returning, but turning
into another tramp’s wandering wish




James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review. More at http://jameshduncan.blogspot.com/