Poem In Balboa Park

Poltergeist, Catacomb, Wailing Voices



There is madness in Balboa Park.



The keystone markers on the Laurel Street Bridge point outward.



A cottontail skirts the boundary of the Zoo.



An owl, a bat, an opossum

Sweep above, below, in the roots

And branches

Of a soon extinct oak.



A madwoman pounds a hammer

Against a metal wall.



Her child runs up and down

Flights of stairs.



One herding.

One disseminating.



The bat flees at owl's cry,

The cottontail leaps into bushes,

Then leaps out again-

Unsure of the predators intentions,

Like the ghost of an ancient relative

Cracked and chipped and sculpted

On the grainy texture of a cement wall.



There is madness in Balboa Park

No exhibit from any museum

Can encapsulate

The peace of solitude found

On stairways that lead into walls,

Archways that only exit, boarded windows

Over second-story passageways

Where the child runs back and forth

Fearing that all these people walking by,

Who invade the invisible and catatonic atmosphere

Will never leave.



The ghosts in Old Town

Are buried under the street

And in the foundations of the settler's homes.



But the phantoms in Balboa Park,

Amongst an architecture so foreign

Studied tourists feel at home,
Walls stay silent while something moves

Within.