The Song of San Francisco

The bullet entered his right temple before the chorus of the song, his brains blown all over the street before he was even able to process the familiar melody he once loved.

No time to enjoy one of his favorite anthems, the bullet entering his skull almost exactly as the lyrics started:

"Baby, I'm going to change your world...." the singer started off.

The driver shook his head and turned the volume up.

***

He inhaled deeply, handed me the pipe, and blew out a great cloud of poisons and toxin.

It was my turn, I had become a little human shaped factory, puffing pollutants into the air from inside my lungs.

This methamphetamine was chemically rich and full of poison never meant to be smoked by a human being.

We heard the gunshots outside our tenderloin SRO room that cost us about 800 bucks a month

for a little coffin of a place with a tiny bed.

We smoked to make sure we didn't sleep. And to provide our own increasingly paranoid thoughts, 

a new terrible urgency to be spoken with.

A machine gun spattering of words

that would flow in an endless barrage

of non-sequiters and misguided beliefs often conspiratorial in nature.

Ultimately, it would be a shared report of the constant pit of useless babble that was our lives.

We spoke until our jaws were sore

and our eyes felt dry and red

and our breath smelled rotten

like the room we were sitting in.

We heard the gunshots and assumed we were finally at war.

Then the song played out, and we stood up and started to gather our things, looking for something.

Everyone loved this song. It was clear the war was over and peace -

in a split second,

decidedly reigned upon the tenderloin.

We peered out the window

and we saw a man leaning forward

with half of his head all over the place in a car.

A man wad smoking a cigarette in the front seat with one foot on the ground, door wide open.

He turned the music up louder.

The war was over.

We had no idea what was next, and we smoked and smoked because we didn't want to know.

Certainly, the tide would change

there outside of the window.

And our money was nearly gone.

Soon, it would be us in the war-torn streets.