Berkeley

my love, my city, my friend.

A place whose heart I cannot encase or

even hope to.

You, whose streets are visceral shifts

churning in liquid wind to overflow

the cups of collective imagine.

The distance of your faces, each the integral parts of

their walls and bricks, who dream of change,

beg for it with paper cups,

paper sieves always filtering love in their breasts.

Your trees, that exist! and silently upstage

these human roots, loving one another

a comfortable amount less than themselves.

And up above, there are far seagulls

small and echoing the chorus that silence sings.

And down below grass soaks like aether rag,

flattened and drowning with happy dirt.

And at head level, there lie enumerated, the sacred many

who stretch emptiness around their clenched ring fingers,

raise them tight to cover their eyes and souls by proximity.

Their brows lift halos of hemp and holy thread.

When my eyes were tight and itched far away, 

I tore the blank buildings to newspaper,

Here, I fail when city motion lends its depth

and harks, like a Siren to the bayshore.

my love, my city, my window into distance.