Aging Summer Rain

I was homeless in my home town, Dulcinea your face was shining over a restaurant counter. The food rich, overpowering.
I had one hand where it should be and one where it didn’t belong.

Leaving was going to be hard, Dulce. Just stepping through the
glass swinging door with the brass bell tied to the push bar.

The day gets harder after I leave you. Would you come with me?

I slept under a folded pad of fence wire, dry — even my cigarettes that I hated to notice.
There was both dust and mud about, the drifting memory of an aging summer rain.

The school patterns were going — a bus, young men and women gathering, order imposed and filtering out like the smell of fat melt wafting from the crockpot.

I missed your shining face, it always shined and probably still does.

I wanted to find it again and I still do.