Lake Claire

Chocolate cream cheese muffins on Sunday mornings
and baked good smells all other days,
aging hippies and younger hipsters,
and Bobby at the market and
that place where all the initials are carved
in the sidewalk's concrete
and the House of Nine Cats and the
AA meetings at the Methodist Church,
and runs around the park, and walks
past the big houses bordering the park,
and then the lady with the longhair cat,
walking with it around her like a mink stole,
and the trick or treating teenagers, and
a house filled with ghosts, friendly and other,
and the mural that the kids did, and festivals,
and cyclists, and flowers, and the Jamaican man
I gave too much money too, and the one in
makeshift robes that I ran from the porch,
and the crazy neighbors I know, and the crazier
ones that I don't know, and ground zero for heartbreak,
and ground zero for coming into my own, and
a place where too much money was spent, and
too much time was wasted, and where my heart felt
at peace so much, where I thought I could spend
the rest of my life, I must leave you soon, as well.