the Rasta man

The rasta man
was old, lean,
and very black
with long grey dread-locks
in a semi-affluent city
where multi-culturalism was celebrated
but at the time,
an actual black face
was a great rarity

he sat on a late Fall bench
near the front
of a vast park
filled with hundreds of trees
planted and fastiduously
labelled and described
for over a century...
the ground beneath many
was now strewn
with leaves pink, yellow,
and red

the somewhat liberal city
had been swinging reactionary
for some time
so it wasn't such a great set-up
for a "drug dealer,"
the dread appelation
the Rasta man earned
for selling generous dime bags
of pot and opium

I liked the Rasta man
not only because I broke
up my college studies with
pot and, for the first time, opium
but because I wondered
where he was from...
with his foreign accent
and the gentle "soul"
that showed through
the scary business he did
(there being well-paid
undercover cops and a vicious jail
to make sure
that drugs were only sold
behind closed doors
by the more affluent)

Did he come from a jungle
or a grasslands
or a vast city
in which somewhere
a lone Starbucks could
be found?

The Rasta man came
like a pink moon
or a scout from
some distant Bohemian civilization,
saw that the winds
were cold
and was gone within a month