For Fresno’s Best Process Service Call Hermes

True, my office is a gold Camino nineteen eighty-two

   & front-work’s on a laptop, but there are older tricks:

this knack I have to spy a sham address: figures

   pried off siding or the silhouette that’s left

when eight is changed to three; my talent to discern

   the perp who hides behind the car or ducks among

the bins or sidles, slams the screen & tries

   for silence then behind his gutted door. Some

will wave a gun or summon dogs. Once a rooster.

   Once an alderman who menaced with a mallet

(croquet) when his trucking company was sued

   & there’s still this lucent bruise on my right heel — 

long story: swan shot, tree house, veteran. Though

   no one wants this dachshund’s weight of paper

compiled by some paralegal underpaid in Phoenix,

   I assure you I will always serve. I am the envoy

(a ball cap hides my third eye). Put me in swift shoes

   or wings, at some cosmic door with only sky behind — 

black-clad, the Prophet of Xerox, steadfast

   bearer of a clerk court’s smeared truncated seal.

I know these streets: the houses boarded up,

   the other heralds driving slow on fractured blacktop;

the sidewalks’ glass & fenders scattered; vacant quarter

   acres returning now to palm & pampas, trees of heaven.

I am waiting at the crossroads, here at your broken gate

   where barbed acacias stoop to shade my trespass.