The Boss

I never thought I’d live, never thought I’d get to say this.
Not in this lifetime or in any other. Last night,
Standing in line at Safeway, I turned to survey all of us,
Shaking my head over how many were waiting to pay,
How few registers were open, and I did a doubletake.
The man behind me looked exactly like Bruce Springsteen.
Not The Boss of my youth, but the one of today,
The man whose picture keeps appearing in the news
Because of his extraordinary speech, at a recent concert,
About our country, the nightmare of our administration.
He held a bottle of wine and a 12-pack of toilet paper.
I smiled awkwardly, and he smiled back.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but I just have to tell you,
You look exactly like Bruce Springsteen.’
He laughed, ‘I get that a lot,’
The kind of response that pushes people to say,
‘So are you Bruce Springsteen?’
He smiled that very Boss smile again, said, ‘Yes, I am.”
He wore no sunglasses, no baseball cap, no incognito look.
Was this guy kidding me? The Boss, surely, would have bodyguards.
‘No, really,’ I repeated, ‘are you really Bruce Springsteen?’
‘Yes, really,’ he laughed again, ‘yes, I really am.’
The line to pay pulsed forward.
Dazed, I asked what he was doing in Hawai‘i.
He has a home here he doesn’t publicly disclose,
Yet he was telling this to me. 
We took another step toward the cashier.
I’d seen him in a 1978 concert he’d played in Madison,
The Darkness on the Edge of Town tour.
‘Wow,’ he said, ‘you don’t look that old, man.’
‘Neither do you,’ I said, ‘and thank you
For what you told the audience in France about the state of the U.S.A.’
His expression turned somber, and he shook his head.
‘It’s getting late. We have to wake up, Lanning.’
This shocked me.  He knew my name?
‘No really,’ he repeated, ‘we have to wake up.’
And I opened my eyes to the sound of the alarm.