Pluck one
Then two
Drag them out
As long as you want
Play the song of their hearts
Feelings as tight as you tuned them
Draw them in
So taunt
Until the chord breaks

Counting the infinite voyage of the stars
Or thinking of all the drops in the sea
And thinking of the grains of sand on mars
Shrinks my body to microscopic sizes, you see.
Perhaps I'll send a paper plane out in the sky
To watch it fly to distance galaxies of tomorrow
And maybe it'll come right back to where I lie
In my bed of restless thoughts of stress and sorrow.

I'll spill some coins into the street
And watch them tumble by
Just watching them speed by leathered feet
Brings a salty tear to my tired eye.
Because coins have journeys of their own
In the musky old worlds of talk
Once carved straight out of stone
And before people knew to walk.

All the pages in the world wouldn't confuse
What thoughts are born today
Even books created from a powerful muse
Couldn't shake what keeps to stay.
Cause once I challenged God and all
To come down from the clouds
And I stood there sweaty and slipped and fall
To my mind of bewildered crowds.

Maybe now is the time to lay down the sword
Of previous gestures and innocent dust
Maybe now is the time to strike a new chord
To create what inevitably should must.
I'm not retiring from smiles and cheer
And no longer should it be any such curse
As to be what it is to create my own course to steer
No one now has to tell me how to write my next verse.

It was an atmosphere.
It was an atmosphere.
It was 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,
It was the question you asked,
Not with words but in the way you breathed against the window glass,
While 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 7th across the sky with burnt orange cascading into the violet of the minor 9th 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.
It was how my energy dripped away into the floods of San Jose,
And how her eyes began to sink into her iPhone 7's screen.
It's in how I long for prolonged eye contact,
It's in how close the answer is but never slips,
I'm not interested in the electric work of fingertips,
I'm interested in connection.

Words etched into the wall (above)
by the augmented fifth
Merely (below) displaced fifth
Blistering drywall
Voweling (in) out the love song
Caramelizing (out) paint
German Shepherd tilts
his (between) her head
Doesn't quite like (around)
The augmented fifth