To All The Beautiful Girls in San Francisco,
where did you come from? You alight on the seats of the MUNI like migratory songbirds and I imagine you laying in my bed, wearing only your yellow boyshorts that I spy peeking above your low slung khaki cargo pants, telling me about your migration from Middle America. In my mind, beautiful girls, you are all from Illinois.
You are dangerous, distractible, delightful. I simultaneously want to take you home and see what your pretty bones look like under all those layers of vintage clothes, and also ask whether you have health insurance (because I worry about those pretty, pretty bones).
In summer, you seduce me not with the standard sundresses (is it ever warm enough here for sundresses?) and sun tans, but the smooth sure roundness of your calves, which is entirely unfair. As sculpted as the curves of a seashell, one August a particularly disarmingly Zanzibar brown pair distracted me from catching the 14 bus up Mission.
I love you, all of you, without discrimination. I am an omnivorous visual slut. I love the defiantly lounging punk girls in the Haight with their kittens curled around their shoulders, because blue hair don't care but also because I want to feed them pancakes with plenty of (vegan) butter and ask where they nest at night.
I love all the tough femmes congregating outside the Lexington wearing their mother's crinolines like their mothers never did. I love them for their pinup tattoos and ability to cry without their mascara running and throw a punch without breaking a knuckle.
I love the girls in the Mission who walk like a big fuck-you and almost a suggestion at the same time, who let their hair blow in the wind like a banner for their own private war. Girls like that make me close my eyes and think of Death and Desire and wonder if God underestimated both.
I love the rockabilly butch who once waved to me and my girlfriend from the bus stop as our overflowing bus pulled away from Castro Street, almost as if to say hello there, tribe. And I love that butch for hir tattoo on hir forearm that read no blood no foul.
I love the hipsters in Valencia, nervous-skinny and too aware of their own breakable beauty for their own good. And sometimes, I could sell my soul just to watch them smoke outside the restaurant; a slow and evocative kind of death.
I even love the fourteen year old girls in bedrooms across San Francisco, noses pressed against windows, watching this glorious parade of misfits strut down the city streets. Poor babies. Just wait, little darlins.
I love all of them, all of them for being alive and awake, for paying attention, for seducing me by standing on the station platform at the 16th and Mission BART and also for boarding the train and never looking back.
Come here, my beautiful battered birds. Bring your broken wings, and crooked teeth, your childhood sexual abuse. Let's all go home, wherever that is, together. We can all hold hands in Golden Gate Park and kiss each other with all the tenderness this beautiful, brokedown city can manage.
