He tells me of his problems.
His job, his girlfriend, his friends, his home
life.
And I nod and I listen.
And I interject sometimes with a cliché or a suggestion, with as much compassion as I can summon.
And he sighs
and takes a long drag from his cigarette, and paws the ground with his Nikes, and hands me the can of beer we are sharing.
And he inhales
                             deeply
as though the air itself can fumigate the scribbles crisscrossing his skull
and with a wisp of smoke
he starts to say something
I don’t know what but
instead, he
                      pauses
in mid-breath
and he turns and looks at me
with sad eyes
But how are
                        you
he says.  
And I pause
just
       long
               enough.

Just long enough for me to look around and sigh;
just long enough for the American Spirits between our fingers to smolder
and for me to weigh the pounder of flat Tecate in my other hand;

just long enough for an overripe lemon to drop
or for a moon flower to blossom
or for a pair of black wings to beat back the wind
or for a bead of dew to skate down a blade of grass;

just long enough for the streak of a lone meteorite to span the sky;

or just long enough for our bones to vibrate in time with the rattle and sizzle and sputter of spraycans in the dark streets behind us
or for the clarion anguish of a million and more homeless to be drowned out by the wail of one sole siren;

I pause
and the world
                           persists.

the earth lurches its creaking bulk sunward for one more day
and the dawn establishes its circumference like a gold aurora;

the desert wind whips down the slopes of Hollywood Hills, past the observatory and Mount Olympus and down Sunset
and its hot dust scours the sidewalk and and slams into our bared and chattering teeth;

And I feel Brian edge

closer to me
concerned
but I have no
                          sense.

The fuming crescendo of space pulses in my head.
My heart is gored through and through by a billion billion whistling neutrinos.
An avalanche of fire from the hills and an inexorable nimbus of smoke advancing on this scatterplot city, apocalyptic-like.

And Brian feels
it now
            too.

A stifled convulsion of thunder.
A muffled ignition of time.
This
         city
an explosion and implosion, expansion and contraction, all thermite and naphtha in its nucleosynthesis, fission and fusion simultaneous;

this pause
just
       long
               enough

for a thousand people or more to grasp for a final breath, their gaping mouths in awe of the energy of one moment;
for this dying
                           place
antenna of flesh and metal, to transmit its final static into the boiling background of the universe until its spiral arms flail no more.

And I contemplate the effect of gravity on a ghost
and the time it takes for the geology of the self to schism
and the fault line in my soul to displace
and the resultant tremors to ripple
through my body and into my epicentered eyes

but I already
                          know
and so does Brian.

He wraps me in his arms
until my trembles subside
and I think
I have paused
just
       long
               enough

to learn the meaning of friend.

lately,
i haven't been my
usual
crazy
delusional
self
maybe,
i finally placed it on
a high
dusty
free from eye
shelf
in dreams,
i see the image of you
immaculate
stupendous
impeccable
in a nutshell
it seems,
i'm defeated, i need your
understanding
compassion
love
*help

Desperation breeds creation
and I cannot forget
that beyond a desperate plea for elation
hides a concurrent twist

An overview of hidden views
never seen in daylight
Is impossible because they're often skewed
but beg for some kind insight

I see a scatterplot of scattered thought
and try to find the truth
But I grow weary within weathered thought
though I remain still in my youth

In the dataset of life, you’re my prime key,  
The one who links all that’s meaningful to me.  
Your love, a clean trend, no outlier in sight,  
A correlation so strong, it feels just right.  

Your smile’s a scatterplot, stars in the night,  
Each point a moment, dazzlingly bright.  
Through every regression, I’ve come to see,  
You’re the model that predicts joy for me.  

You’re my mean, my median, my mode,  
The balance in every analytical code.  
In a world of variance, you’re my SD,  
Reducing the chaos, setting me free.  

Every pie chart of my heart has your slice,  
A percentage of love, immeasurably nice.  
Your laughter’s a histogram, tall and wide,  
Frequency of happiness I feel inside.  

When life’s a null value, you fill the field,  
A completeness in you I’ve always revealed.  
Our love’s R-squared, so perfectly fit,  
A relationship bound by data-driven wit.  

Together, we visualize a future so clear,  
A dashboard of dreams, forever near.  
In the analysis of love, there’s no dispute,  
You’re my final report, my absolute truth.