Hoping for Fog

Perhaps
your world is better
than mine could ever be.
This ghetto-noir existence,
Everything to keep folks
concerned with their safety
far away.

Then I look westward;
Your picture-postcard world.
The sun and palm trees,
the omnipresent ocean.
You could buy my whole neighborhood
for what your house alone is worth.

But I am the rooted one.
I've loved this city,
as only an optimist can.
I was born and will die here;
upgrading my situation, perhaps,
but never being too far
from where I started.

And I know I've blown my one shot,
Hurtful
when you had been hurt enough.
Yet it is was that aftermath
that I truly fell under your spell.

I miss the person you are now,
who the years have shown you to be.
I miss the person you once were,
back in those wilder, more open days.

Yet only dreams
have let me dare look into the future.
A pleasant scene, always (quite unlike yours).
Friendship and intimacy
as a single common thing.
A pleasant awakening, but still just a dream.

But I wonder,
if the future is so obscured by fog.
No trace of definition anywhere.
Might we stumble back to the common ground
we've smoothed down through the years?
And might this fog someday
be shared?