An Astoria Love Unborn

You ran away. That’s it.
Places of America.
Answers in cafes,
treelines along highways,
the unbroken horizons of the stolen
Americans.
Medicine far away.
A different cosmology.
To wade in saltwater far away.
Pancakes in Delaware.
Toss that electricity into a portal
on the other side of the Milky Way.
We will die before anyone truly understands
any of this human or American stuff.
We will die before it’s you that realizes
you ran away.
Does consciousness realize itself?
Is there a memory called love
or an overturned wooden rowboat
on the beach in Oregon,
is that a metaphor of a Saturday
that is too old?
That is gone before the jealousy
of the ocean’s fury
with children in red hats
chasing the seaspray’s reflection.

Simple Math

These people
were asking about me
marrying you.

There was yellow.
There was light blue.

We’re not Swedish
but it was Summer.

And they asked
if I still think of you.

I don’t think you’re in
any mental space
to understand how
all these exchanges
are delicately computational.

Lofty clouds off in the distance.
A kingdom that’s become
nonexistent
or they
never existed to begin with
for the
sacred realm of words
up there

that materialized
destroyed
and echoed today.

There is disease in my heart.

My consciousness is a dance each day.

A beat that is slow, bad and good.

An apple
I remember eating atop Astoria, Oregon
while bathed in sunlight.

At least this was not you

. . . so I can somehow still live.