I wish that I could say that it came out of a situation, but it came out of nowhere as I was eating chocolate and thought of the chocolate factory in San Francisco. I think it is called Ghiradelli’s.

————

Like the clatter and jangle of the wheels of a trolley car

on the streets of San Francisco, my life bumps and grinds

forward, in desolation, coffee in hand.

The sweet aroma of chocolate fills the early morning air

and pierces the smutty fog inside my brain.

Pungent odours of the unwashed come to my face.

Blank stares on the faces of the masses.

How could it possibly be Monday! Nothing changes.

The trolley comes to a clanging halt; people jump

out of their seats to enter the real world of grim and

grime and madness that is our newspaper office.

Unnerving for some, perturbing for others, unsettling

for a few and disconcerting for me. My distress is palpable.

A piece of me wants to run the hundred-yard dash

before the last ounce of pleasure is wrung from me.

I don’t see that happening in this microcosm.

I imagined that all would be romance in this world and

at the disposal of a newspaper gal, a news-hound, a sleuth,

a seeker of truth and political scandal; but no,

I get to interview sloths and cretins and name-droppers

and elitists and social climbers, those dregs of our society

who bathe in the stink of others, and love the whiff of a

tragedy or a sick joke or the misfortune of some,

the countless numbers, the desperate, the futile, the bleak.

I long to banish those who reek superiority, those

who hold down the masses for their perverse

selectivity, while having a love affair with the absurd

and play with false passion. I would tell stories of

what is real in this life, what matters, what has substance,

what has significance, what counts in the end;

Yet, I am swimming upstream, like some blind salmon

looking for a better place. And so, I wait

to tell stories of human tragedy, and comedy

poured out into the world as a band-aid on life,

a patchwork quilt of nuances and ways of being

more real than the artists’ bold colours on a canvas.

Stories that make people sit up and take notice of what

is going on around them, what happens when they

remove the rose-coloured glasses they stare out from

every day to make life possible within their prisons.

By Elizabeth Sams

From: Canada

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