It was an atmosphere
It was an oxygen mixed with southern fog
Southpaw gloves tied in sailor knots
Waves of golden grains in ocean wind
The rolling hills behind property lines

It was the question you asked
not with words but in the way you breathed against the window glass
as I leaned against your Corolla
And we sang under the overpass

It was graffiti
It was graffiti
It was the cavernous concrete cats with purple hair and acid wash jean jackets
melting the light of their city's street lamps into the obsidian void of moistened pavement

It was the way the reverb spread the major seventh across the sky with burnt orange cascading into the violet of the minor ninth
which reminds me of crickets and summer nights (and violins and cellos and midwestern jazz bars)
and how bar chords are a guitarists way of flipping off a crowd-
surfing the web for an answer to why I'm still single-
handedly the handsomest man in my car currently.

It's the cloth in my empty passenger seat
soaking up the air of my A/C heat
and the scent of the soil spilt from the succulent I was given at a wedding last fall
and now I don't know if my trunk will ever smell clean at all

But I'll let this night be interstellar
I'll take a bath in the Big Dipper and write you a letter about Orion's Belt
or how I miss the stars sparkling in your eyes making contact with the E.T. in me.

Phone me home, darling.
I'm lost at sea.

-W.J. Thompson

Furious, I shook my fist at God
and said,
How could you allow this!

With an eyebrow raised,
God answered:
*I could ask you the same question.

The potential in the collections of seconds which crescendo into minutes in the clock of an outdated watch simmer furiously with their inability to communicate with their bearers and explain or at least signal that now would be exactly the perfect time to go and
                          just
                                do it.

The question respirates
the acrylic aperture
behind the eardrum.
A responsive tongue to the palate
taps out the consonant.
But before the note descends
with musts in the glass-
The cathartic statue
refracts the
synapses stretching
continuums
to grant a
minuscule autocracy.
Already charting north,
fingers fluently gather
ego between the
sundered reverb of the vowel.
Already twisting key,
pressing restive feet
to acquiescent gasoline.

It is
beginning.
Mouse on the C
Mouse on the keys
Photovoltaic benjamins
New cologne: Mars Musk
X marks the interstellar profit
Build-a-baby with CRISPR-Cas9
Mouse jumping playing "Für Elise"
Are words worthy of the afternoon?
Does the value offer gain an interest?
Nicholas coils are being insistent.
Mouse waving, saying, "see!
Will you follow me?"
Scampers toward
ignited rockets
I'll follow him
into the
gold
rush

You are,
               what you feel.
You are,
             what you think.

But you
             can
                    change how you feel by changing what you think-

I think.

I could tell you about my acoustic guitar:
The phosphor bronze strings against the rosewood neck, or how my favorite chord sounds like stars and sleeping bodies.

I once wrote a love song
about mocha (and a girl)
But I forgot the lyrics
because I wasn't in love

An artist once accused me of giving up,
Of losing faith, of being lazy.
And he was a little bit right.
But music! Music is so easily produced,
quickly consumed, rarely reused.
How do you cash in talent
without melting into the
easily digested hooks
of Swift and Grande?