NO BITTERNESS: OUR ANCESTORS DID IT --Robinson Jeffers "Ave Caesar"

Winter Place Genny Lim I live in this foghorn moon of a fishhole alley Every night there's derelict dog, mangy with a cataract stare Lickin' the wounds of old North Beach Leftovers, fish 'n chips, upchucked cheesesteak, antipasti Blasted against the antiseptic glare of trendy restaurants, glossy Gelatos Where MTV couples glide frozenly by Catching in the corners of their ray banned eyes Their store bought reflections It ain't so bad Sundry hookers straining their fleshbait out of windows, doorways Orifices of the Europa glistening like fish It ain't so bad The winos and the refugees, bag can ladies and panhandlers Eye talians, Chinamen, tourists, punks, junkies Boat people and runaways Converging on this teeming waterhole where the corporate buffalo roams The city reeks of crab shells, fishheads, cabbages Soiled pampers, cappuccino and Kotex in shocking orange and pink Day glo shopping bags ripped and spewing out the Guts of Chinatown, Chinatown, where the lights are low They all come The natives like homing pigeons Midwesterners like homesteaders Southerners like shipwrecked sailors Eastcoasters like fugitives Through the fog laden cable cars plummeting over Russian Hill backyards and narrow chopstick alleyways where camera toting tourists eat cheap chop suey and snap moon faced babies wide eyed on their mothers' backs out of curiosity It ain't so bad the Indians once said as they traded their land for horses as they traded their land for firewater as they traded their land for beads It ain't so bad the Coolies reasoned as they jumped ship only to sweat in baskets with pickaxes and dynamite twenty thousand feet in the Sierras like wet human laundry