An Ode To San Francisco

I am walking,

down Her lonely alleys and weathered streets, the heights of Her pristine affluence long since peaked. 
Once beating, beaming, and alive, She is now a throbbing, diseased, and malnourished husk. 
She is now a putrid and cancerous image, frail and frayed, reflecting upon bright crystalline towers. 

Hers is a belly swollen and bloated, even as Her populace languishes, catatonic and shambling under flickering lights, beneath starless skies, vacantly staring, passed out in narrow gutters, in vast and expansive avenues.

She is manic, metamorphic; Her waves sweep through craggy, rocky, and serpentine ways. She feels an aching tenseness, conscious as a lucid dream, alive with sobering ideas of visceral pleasures. In sanguine nights and luminescent mornings. Numb and sweaty, aching with memory and revelation. Illuminated, enlarged, and enfevered with purpose, with ecstatic and corporeal experiences.

She is looming, calling, spreading contagiously through bits of saliva and dripping perspiration.

Skipping skipping skipping, over black lines on gray concrete, eyes down and feet dragging.

Odes to you, the sweet, salty spray of human decay. Odes to you, from visions of a bay in disarray.

A skyward maze to escape, if I could but afford the ascent… A gaze deprived.

Of hues of blue not coupled with red, or encircled in quadrilateral silicone of metal and plastic. Her cold hand forever at my back, pushing, pulling, crying, begging, to keep,

Walking.