The Tenderloin

In San Francisco, Market Street runs from the Bay to the Rainbow Hill.

A straight ascent, tramcars, trolley cars, taxis rise from the sea to the sky.

Somewhere, in between the city skyscrapers and the bijou boutiques, lies the Tenderloin, an underworldly place, that parallels the everyday of San Francisco. An otherworldly shadow, not much spoken of, not much admitted to, passed by, passed over – but it doesn't go away.

The Tenderloin

by

Ronnie Dorsey

Meaty, "main meal of the day", smells carry on the air

The burnt out fag end day grinds up the last part of its hill

Its gears slipping and complaining like the cable cars

Weary workers worry to their hives

The honey calling home

As crouched night-crawlers

Blinking at the dark

Appear from closed doorways

Always in the shadow of sly deeds

Into the streets they take their wares

Tinselled streets

With hair all dressed in neon green and red

Sequined silvered baubles blink from come on shrieking windows

Christmassed all year round

And night sounds coming on in waves

Now bars and pubs blend bottle-banging music

As the Muzak of the Jukes jar and jam

Some notes might be mellow

But the sticky jell-o of a multitude of tunes congeals to only noise

Cars, trucks, taxi cabs

The drunken parts of men that sit in flashing dark

Their shouting conversations float out with the bands

They come to find their missing lives

The promise lost

That floats on every bloated face

Their missing home

Their lost purposes

Beer dreams drown hurt confusions

Helping men forget their pointlessness

Hip-swaying, lip-pouting, finger-snapping girls come out like gaudy, gadding butterflies

Not old enough to drink

But bone-old eyes assessing dimes and dollars to the cent

All selling innocence accordingly

Bright eyed -

Too bright -

The pupils only commas in their story here

They form conveyor service

Slick as silky crime

Although their honest grime more honourable than business in the banks

As the street begins its night

The first of soup-dispensing goodies open shop.

Pavlovian, sad dreamers working god

A soapy, smiling, slimy god

And all will be forgiven.

The black souls scraped of all clogged sins like furred-up arteries.

"Eat, repent and go to heaven".

A siren calls, a lost part-creature loses it,

Its black blood thick molasses widening as watchers pass,

Not even breaking stride.

Cold cops descend, like blowflies blue and black,

All shiny laying yellow maggot crime scene tapes

And spraying all-important macho scents of territory.

A gay man with his trimmed and powdered hound walks on.

His smile unmoveable, his world all neat and ordered, chaos not allowed.

Nothing ever touches him.

The gangs so intent on cool approval of themselves

Admire reflections of their colours in dirty glass

Whilst wiping out each other.

Broken things, part men and women, every one of them.

On the corner, under sodium-sick light

The old crone leans and weighs her weight like iron on a flimsy stick,

Though no stick sturdy enough now to carry all that burden of her emptiness,

That red rock of despair, the unforgiving self of her, too heavy for this world.

The next life cannot lighten things too soon.

She waits.

The young girls twitter like the hungry birds they are,

They warm her old cold bones and her regrets.

A John pulls in at littered kerb and does swift business with a child -

Too young to tell which gender -

The pale-faced, doughy man takes off his prize, his momentary splendour

To a wasteland alley, and disappoints the pair of them.

A million times this night

The grey crone cackles at it all

As ghetto king comes strutting with his silver box of bees,

Their buzzing rhythmic as the fucking.

He kicks the stick she leans on out from under,

And she hisses curses as his spittle hits her face.

His hate is evident, as loud as hers.

This is the gutter they have gathered on,

The sin sinks to the mud that they're embedded in.

And we pass by

The Tenderloin.