The weather inside

It is not the when or how of it even, though it doesn't help to dwell, that is for sure. The afterwards is the thing that makes my heart squeeze in my chest. Even if i can't ever be alive anymore and forever, i want some little few atoms to stay awake out there, to know that once i did rent my tiny plot of galaxy. I want those few specks of dust to remember how I loved it there, my life in its all consuming inconsequence. For what are we, if we are not everything and nothing at once? I often wonder, how will it be when I can not listen to my favourite songs, and don't even know i had them? When there is not even a thing called music, not so much as a single Middle C floating through space? Every perfect sentence i've ever read erased from every beige page I've ever turned. Every chink of glass, every chew and swallow. Every time i have felt the sun in spring and thanked the world for waking up and joining me again. Every melody i've gotten the intonation of just right, sitting at my piano. All the pretty young mouths I've kissed and faces that make me smile just in the seeing of them, just in the thinking of them. Winter nights run ragged right through, summer days lolled away in patchy grass, gathering not much but freckles. All the butterflies, light like dust, skittering about in matching pairs, and the ocean of a trillion, million tonnes. All the people who know what's right and wrong with me better than I ever will. All my loves uncountable. A jar of air, weightless and unknowing.

California

There is a special kind of kindness inside the Californian dreamers, liberals and crackpots and their endless directions and the way they look you right there in the middle of your face and crack a smile and don't look away. They paint their letterboxes there and don't seem to lock their doors at night. They serve you up food that tastes more like food than anywhere else. They are proud and so they should be. For they live right there on the edge of God's paradise with their horizon a few inches longer than the rest of ours under their big bold American sky.