Particles
Numerous
Grandeur in their audacity to
Compare me to each insignificant blade of grass
As I stand above the overpass

Blurry reds and whites
Melting apathetically in with the dusting of pink

Almost lept from my gravitational pull
Instead remembered how good it felt
When your indecency once slid up
The opening in my dress
I stayed planted
Promising my dillusion the same temptations
Would ultimately make another appearance
In the infinite rotation of a tangled set of lucid moments

And maybe,just maybe
This time
They'd stay a little longer.

Hoarders houses
Filled to brim
overgrown fig tree's
fallen chestnuts
heat no longer rising from the asphalt
faded American Flags
TV's blaring

The pink clouds of
warm blooming roses

the musky air of
freshly put out forest fires
stale aftertaste of bitter coffee

is this your home?
Do you reside here?
How can you breathe with all of this smog filling your lungs?
Do your legs ache for a new path?

Neighborhood cats
curiously follow you
making no sudden movements
tense
on the verge of making it
past.

I sit nodding while the sweat drips
Sliding down my spine
Tracing the marks he left
The night before

Singing alongside
Drinking the smoke from the
Orange air
Toes curling
While the AC burns hot
I don't sleep
I don't blink

I live to feel
How it passes through me
How weightless my abdomen becomes
When the world no longer watches me
When he moves his hands
Farther away from the tips
I breathe

On rainy days
I look up poems set in Seattle,
then look back at the rain set against the window

I imagine the water was carried here
from the shores of their bay
across Pike Place, through Belltown,
in buckets they use
to carry Pacific salmon off fishing boats,
or in lidded Styrofoam bowls used
to take out clam chowder

I practice walking in this manner, sans umbrella, through the parking lot of a South Florida strip mall.

When I reach the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts, past the laundromat and the check cashing store, I channel my inner Seattleite: poised in wet socks,
unrushed as the sips they take from their mugs when its **** pouring outside

I renounce sugary accoutrements and have what they're having:
Black coffee with a splash of rain,
A balance perfected on their slanted hill streets
that breed more poets per capita
than anywhere else in the country

Vegas can have its mirages in the desert
San Francisco, its gold bridge

I think I should just have this coffee,
and this rainy day
as the poem it is.

As the rain batters the car
sighs born in a
love/hate stalemate
weigh down the air

Forests surround the parking
lot, protecting
our thoughts, nothing
saves me from you

Words spoken incompletely
float in the clouds
of sad warm breath
and ghosts turned to flesh

Limbs untangle and reach for
the moon, stereo
cherubs sing tunes
of sweet death metal