A Navajo turquoise cigarette box reflects the last rays of sunlight.
You inhale and exhale.
I am just watching your breath there in a cloud.
Floating up over the best tee-shirted crowd you've ever seen.
Up over the stage.
Through wavelengths of bass and guitar.
Drums and tuba.
Into a baby blanket blue sky.
I am watching you there.
In a lone passing cloud.
A cottonball dipped in bactine to soothe the pain.
Bass rumbling your chest.
Sun burning your shoulders.
Among still-lifes of portable plastic rectangular toilets,
Jeans and dresses.
Square screens on each side of the stage.
Wires connecting.
Connecting.
Connecting microphones, amplifiers, lights.
Connecting recorders, on metal poles like towers, that capture you there.
You inhale and exhale with crumpled five dollar bills in your pocket.
Lily Allen is singing "At first when I see you cry, yeah it makes me smile." In the distance, a blue balloon floats up
And you are 6-years-old riding your bicycle on a Buffalo sidewalk.
On a city street.
Sticky with the heat.
You exhale and I watch that moment
Float up over the tents and port-o-lets and disappear.
Thinking: Call me stupid. You can call me that.
Twenty years from now if you can see me.
Call me stupid.
But even that disappears
In an exhale of natural tobacco
That was wrapped in paper and placed in a perfect turquoise box.
Your breath leaves
And I am thinking about how many words would fit on a cigarette paper.
The most important ones for sure:
Love;
You;
Bent chain link fence;
Niagara Falls.
In an exhale,
With the music filling the space,
I am traveling again.
Standing in a trampled down field of grass
With the light leaving the day.
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