CA 91311

And this is why I love it here:

It is the beaches, and the city, and the nature, and how this place turns my cumulus dreams into granite reality. Everything spills from my mind, my waterfall mind, and everything is mine and my pillow imagination. It is how everything is everything I've always dreamed about.

It is how everything is the same in different ways. It is the glamour and the size, the glitter and the only thirty dollars I have (spent on gifts for my best friends, miles and miles away), the everyday coffee that is never quite right and the clothes and plastic bags. Oh! so many clothes and plastic bags.

It is how I can read here, read and only read. It is the different worlds that spin and take turns inside the bones of where I think. It is how this place has put so many universes inside my mind.

It is how far I am from everyone I know and how close I am to everyone I am unfamiliar with. It is how here this is a different culture and different diction and different colored skin and lips and eyelids. It is how there is blonde here, that didn't have to turn blonde. It is how I bump shoulders with people I have nothing in common with, people who do not have my blood in their veins or my language on their tongues. It is how I am different here and yet the same, for we are all melting under the sun we share with the world. It is how I've managed to push myself inside a crowd that takes me in, that absorbs me, like a sponge.

It is how close I am to the music I love and the movies I adore and the musicians and actors and actresses I look at with different eyes. It is how close I am to seeing my favorite things before my eyes, my favorite people right beside me. Them, and all their bones and all the blood that swishes in their bodies, and their voices that I am too familiar with except with no microphone and no speakers. It is how much it could've been real and natural. It is how this place makes them real and not just people I have to look at through a screen.

It is how the sun sets here too late, and so everyone is awake when the sun is awake, and sleeping is a hard thing to do when the city I rest my head upon is alive with the stars and there is still too many things to do.

It is how the stopwatch is so cruel. It is how it ticks too loud. It is how it will only be ticking for another couple hours before I am on an airplane, looking at lights from the clouds.

And once again I will be forced to live inside my head, my life confined to the cracks on my cranium, and my citrus dreams of summer in the beach, in the city, in the glamour, in the tiny living space, will once again be locked inside my little home, inside my little mind.

And that is why I wish tomorrow never comes, for I want more time to see my insides in the beautiful Californian sun.

TRAVELERS

where did my ideas go

did they hide in the mind from which they flow

or slip from the skin from which they grow

and fly to the stars and together they glow

or mourn with the moon or caw like a crow

swim down trenches, no matter how low

or entrance little kings, kissing their toes

or asking the queen the little she knows;

did they coil like a snake in the cold of the snow

graze in the grass with bedizened does

or break out of prison, causing a row

or saunter out ballrooms, princes in tow

(and leaving them hanging and wailing in woe

or laying on daises on lips on pillows);

did they spill out of skin that is sliced into bows

or turn into dancers, gliding down my nose

brandishing swords and singing with foes

spinning in circles in alphabet prose

hiding in the petals of a candle wax rose

going where the coffee wind blows –

____oh where!

____did my ideas go

andrew

it's the name less people know you by, it's a name reserved for the lovers of trivia and those most devoted to you. it's thread that contorts itself into the shape of "trouble" when it falls to the ground. it flies out of the mouths of few people, swims in the eyes of close to none. but it's always been your name. your second, but your name nonetheless.

a year ago i made my mind your home. my version of "you." my puzzle-pieced-up version of you. the only words that came out of your mouth were the only words i could hear you say. your vocabulary grew within months and i never knew everything. you were a quilt: comforting and covering and on top and warm and made out of patches of the small things my eyes have seen of you.

today my eyes are still seeing. new things and old things and things that might have never mattered had you not –

i will never know who you are, mon cher acteur, mon cher amour – or who you were, because that is more grammatically correct, given the situation we found ourselves in, but that has never been the way anything felt when it came to you.

some days you are still the most gorgeous, and still the first, because you were the first, and you were the start of a lot of things – but that place is not yours anymore, my dear. but your place is still your place no matter where it is, and that is in my heart. just like in licorice and sugar and gummy worms and gummy bears. just like in candy.

but my mind is not your home anymore. but you still have my heart. not all of it, but a part of this blood-pumping organ much like my clenched fist is yours.

i've been clenching my fists since you –

Aimes et Adores

But not really.

He's candy canes and snow (sometimes snowstorms) and sunshine. I've always called him sunshine. I've always seen him as sunshine. He's globes and fruits and footballs and bruises and thunder and helicopters. And lotion. He's – everything. Sadly. Thankfully. He's become everything. He became everything somewhere in the animation of flying calendars. Or maybe he was the pilot the flew the dates.

And you are something. You are not everything, you are something, and you are something special. You're not the couch, not the rug, not the walls, the ceilings, the lights. You're a smile, you're a tear, you're the stubble, you're your words, sometimes you're my words.

He isn't a ticked box and you're not crossed out on my checklist. He goes without saying and you are something new. You are something new.

All new things turn old. But I'm praying not you. I can't have two everythings because there's only one universe (despite what you might have experienced) but I don't have to choose. I'd choose him anyway. I'd always choose him.

But, oh, how I do I love you.

The First Person

i. on the the moon

Found falling to be the hardest.

It's hard to slip into this, sometimes, and it's hard to fit into dresses and skin. And into everything in between. Hard to have words spill from mouths and to tip kisses from someone else's lips. Hard to draw what can't be thought about. Hard to hold what isn't concrete and to watch what isn't being shown. Hard to break what is already in pieces.

Hard to fall when anti-gravity doesn't allow it.

ii. playing with mold

Strange when accidents are a part of destiny... or whatever.

Coincidental meetings and perfect-to-disastrous timing. Laughing and then the room suddenly becomes much brighter. Having a good time and then having a baby right after.

And all that stuff. Accidents. Everyone's had them.

It's just weird when coincidences make sense.

Never wanted this to happen.

iii. brighter suns

I want you to understand something.

Bridal veils and wedding cakes are in the future, and doves, and wedding bands and the gleams that reflection gives flight to, and other things, like me and you, and everything – we're going to want everything and more commas. I promise you we're going to want everything.

We're going to name the stars and we're going to dictate the positions of the galaxies. We're going to collect stardust and assemble planets. We're going to do a lot of things, and the things we create will be the shoes we use to stomp on the earth to leave our footprints.

Comets. We'll have comets. Like dogs. Except celestial.

And dictators – we'll be those, we'll dictate everything, because we know how the universe must work, and we will point pistols to foreheads, swear we turned into everything we never wanted to be, and we will shoot our beliefs and our bullets into the brains of the elder who've seen what's been and the youth who've seen what could've been, and then we'll shoot each other –

My hands will be too used to the gun, and I'll be too familiar with the trigger – and you will make me befriend remorse again at your wake.

You'll always be the first person, because you made everything make sense, and first person was no longer me, or I, or we, or us, or anything that included me – because there was you, and you became my first person.

And you'll always be the first.

iv. confession

(I) go insane sometimes.