Brian’sPoems

Cordiform LA Button

I stepped off the sand and onto the strand. I looked down at my shadow and saw Caesar’s commanding presence: the legacy of Rome alive and well standing fierce under the L.A. Sun.

That is what I remember most vividly. Except I can also remember the evening spent in San Juan Capistrano where the band rocked a small bar singing about lions and silver spaceships, not even whispering about the bag of groceries taken off the shelf too early. But I did not mind, at least at first. I was spending my time waiting, watching, and wondering. Time is not time when spent with good friends. We drank (me enjoying the best fountain cola I had ever tasted). I bellowed that I could not fight the feeling. My friends laughed, but they knew I was holding back. About that time a drunken miser stumbled on top of me, and it was all I could do to suppress the seething, yellow rage. Afterwards I sat in compliance, even during the conga.

My thoughts stripped away reality and I was in a world where women wore no clothes and I could breathe deep in self-fulfillment. And in that dream world lived the girl I had written on the plane (over the plains); strange, aloof, never fitting, like the wrong size screwdriver. And lest I sell her short, I must reveal that she, my first heart-stopper, possessed a beauty rivaled only by her intelligence. But I dribble…

Then I visited the only girl that dragged me to the edge of love. (Stopped cold I was, but I am still too young and inexperienced to know why.) Of course everything inside of me was present there, but I only noticed the sacrifices I made now and would in the future as I pondered my crossroads, especially that Western Path.