crossing an intersection in Barbaria

A shiny Jaguar blasts by.
My eyes move between the red hand
and the huge truck's blinking turn signal.
I get the white Walk hand:
the truck turns immediately, anyway,
but the next Volvo yields.

I maneuver past a staggering hobo
as he asks me for a dollar,
and avert my eyes
from a scantily clad blonde Venus
with a top and smile I'd worship
in a coffeehouse...

But now I've eyes only
for shards of broken glass,
an approaching red Porsche,
and the hard-eyed businessmen
thronging into the intersection
in a lock-step threesome
I must slip through
or be pushed into the Porsche

Having slipped between
their baton-umbrellas and indignant eyes,
I make it to the sidewalk
where, my nerves frayed,
I commit the crime of lighting a smoke
in a non-authorized zone
within a hundred yards
of a bar or a car dealership
where people are peacably
going about the free enterprise
of blocking out the sun,
melting the world's glaciers,
and drinking whisky
as they watch college football players
ram into each other like American kamikazes
without airplanes or causes

I stop into a deli
and buy a salami sandwich
from an old Italian man
who looks like he's sculpting
an edible "David,"
and cross an easier intersection
where I find myself by a rose garden
in front of a church
with a bright white bench
and a lovely statue of Jesus.
But I don't dare sit down
because someone behind
the stained-glass windows
would likely call the cops
and the use of their white bench
would doubtless constitute "criminal trespassing"
and then they'd throw me in a dungeon
where I'd have to listen
to their barbaric superstitions
and there wouldn't be any roses or white benches...

so I keep on going,
climbing poorly kept concrete steps
toward my apartment,
carefully edging past a haggard old lady
with a bag of groceries
as she carefully edges past me
(neither of us liking or disliking,
caring or loathing,)
just two beat machine gears
sliding past one another

As I approach my apartment and safety,
an elite fighter jet zooms overhead
(burning my ears
and trying to drown out my thoughts,)
but I think anyway how many millions
that jet costs,
how much more than everyone I saw today,
everyone for blocks and blocks:
the drunks and the saints,
the Italian sandwich artist,
the road-workers, the poets,
Jesus, and the old woman with her groceries

And I wonder who's flying
that space-age war bird:
Does he read Hemingway
or Shakespeare?
Is he a devoted warrior,
a good-natured dim-wit,
a broken "yes sir" zombie,
a secret lunatic:
perhaps some fusion of each?
Does he know his salary
wouldn't touch up his plane's paint?

If he got the orders tommorow,
would he bomb us
instead of the foreign non-human "enemy?"