that night, it rained moments of my life till i was drenched in details and the mattress became a life raft. there was as much below my heavy head as up above. what is ours floated to the surface and into thin air. sentiments about daylight and the fact that manhattan, too, was once just a forest where flowers bloomed in the darkness rang true and loud in my ear- it woke me up from my rented sleep in this rented home. i stayed up to wonder about the injustice of city gardens and to imagine us as teenagers by roman fountains. i thought about how i loved how we explain the world to each other; i loved how we laughed and how we loved, over and ever again. but i know the pictures we took were already outliving us. i imagined them in a hundred years in stowed boxes overflowing like a faucet & our memories pouring out into the hands of our city kin.

i saw the whole thing from the grass where i lied while you laid. the ring around the moon meant rain was coming to us soon too.

fool about town. break down about time. i just miss the airport and the whole thing is exposing and unfit for winter. girls catch colds in temperatures like these.

pretty girls sit in a west side bank safe looking for trouble and treasure.

Old friends collect like constellations in a sky full of starry storytellers and say, "do you remember when...?"

your calm keeps me up all night. it is the summer of pink elephants and in between two cities of fourteen hills is the sea where i keep secrets about men in the sun, naji al ali and the butterfly's burden. creators and inventors were raised in these villages and grew beards and brains from this soil's suffering. they were all strangers and heros to me and held me up as well as any Sufi prose. especially under tarzan's spell, folklore replaces reality and the hill is where i got engaged to a mosquito!

yukon gold seeping in through the blinds
projects sunlight lines on the pillow & you sang,

"i wanted to make it...
i got that from waiting here.
tran tran a la la,"

"ta ta
tip top tap, my dear.
we've seen how strong winds blow,
but i've had you all this time."

future flash forward to a time machine
and we'll go back to the city of apples, or those orange groves by the sea.