Whatever happened to Kimi, I wonder?
The kid across the canyon from us
in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains.
We never saw him when he wasn’t making surfboards,
their white and yellow stripes
bright as Christmas wrapping.

I’m not sure he even surfed,
but a builder, in his garage,
sure hands laying fiberglass on polyurethane foam.

In southern California folks ease
Buicks and VWs into carports
after doing time on the Santa Monica Boulevard,
and when they take them out,
dreams attach.
They come spooling like coaxial cable.

It takes me back, these corn maze sidewalks
on Saddle Ridge: block after block,
the perfume of someone’s laundry
side-venting into the street,
tidied lives, tapped up, tucked up
against one another.

And how I love them in retrospect, the way
I love big data, the sprawl off Highway 80,
close enough to smell sweet-crude,
Emerald City winking of refinery towers,
turrets topped with flame.
There are football stadiums
that hold more people than this city does.
We’re in the nose-bleeds:
by the school house dark,
a night-shift cop, cruiser gone.
House dark, shades down, house dark, another.

But then blazing, on a leatherette couch
where the garage door would be, some guy
with a video console, eyes fixed like a ferret’s
his eight or nine-year-old brother
on the lawn with an electric gun
flashing pinball lights, gunning me.
Yeah, you got me, kid.
But I’m a poet.
I got you first.