The pictures today have nothing to do with the writing...

I wasn’t deliberately evesdropping on a quarreling couple sitting with a child of maybe eight or nine at the coffee shop where I was waiting for friends who were frolicking in the Ocean Beach surf on this fine summer morning.  Other patrons looked as uncomfortable as I felt when the man and woman  came into the shop and continued a discussion, more of an argument, that had been going on before they stopped for coffee.  The child looked uncomfortable.  He held his father’s hand.  The woman’s voice was loud and uncompromising. She looked directly at him seeming unaware of the dozen or so coffee shop patrons. For her we didn’t exist. The man spoke softly not looking at her.  He was trying not to make eye contact with other people in the room... clearly wishing he could be somewhere else.

Later when I was hope alone at my computer, I remembered snippets of their argument, imagined the conversation I had heard was happening in their home at night instead of at the coffee shop... I made a poem.

Summer on the Other Side of Town

“A truck or a car doesn’t have a soul,”

she insists after he says the whine

of freeway traffic sounds lonesome.

It takes something away from him

that he can’t explain even to himself

when she declares flatly how wrong he is.

He decides to try to say it another way,

but she says after she hears the train whistle

sliding through the night to their bedroom,

“And that damned train is a pain in the ass.”

“Good Night,” was all he could think to say.