at Broadway and Grand

yet its name just leaped 

off my tongue

like my great-uncle Gary

who leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge

to his Pacific Ocean coffin.

They never found his body

like I can’t find the name

of that Grand Avenue café.

On a grand ultraviolet day,

its walls got smashed 

by a wrecking ball.

Before they flipped over 

their ‘CLOSED’ sign

for the terminus time, I stood 

in a café line 

that pays a property tax

to occupy my memory

where I picked up offshoots 

of a conversation

like how Gary 

picked me up in his gray pickup truck 

at the Amtrak station on 2nd and Alice.

He smiled with such unshackled joy

as he drove through a rainstorm.

In the café line, I remember 

these big fat raindrops 

muscled themselves down to the ground

as one friend said to the other:

“Did you hear they just put a net

around the Golden Gate Bridge

to catch anyone trying to commit suicide?”

I itched to jumpstart a suicide

from the café line

when an employee, a savior

with coffee-black hair,

ushered me forward

with a midday whistle. 

Yesterday I saw this employee 

unemployed and unhoused 

next to the Starbucks on Clay.

After I dropped them a silver dollar,

I ambled home under a silver moon

round like a noose.

Published in Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast (April 2025) and in Monetized Happiness