Fires in the sky of California and sunset in the desert’s been chased beyond the sepia void,
where mountains once screamed for the title of what’s left on our horizon.

It’s as though they’d all gone fucking mental, but now they’re gone, too, don’t you see?

They were onto something.

I never thought I was insane,
just that I allowed myself to be treated undisputedly towards and through the brink of my own,
regenerative,
nuclear
meltdown.

Keeping cool,
For now, though, thinking of when you asked me if I’d ever been to Aspen.
That helps.

Instead of separate homes, a part of me wishes we were riding towards the Gas Lite, at the end of the line,
Down on Wilshire, Karaoke Wednesdays every night,
And you’re in your board shorts and flip flops and once we’re there we spill the spells, and you

tell me there’s a secret reservoir somewhere apparently in Malibu, where
If you keep going straight down old Crags road, there’s a lake nearby made from a dam.
You say we’ll find a Left up ahead and once we take it that’s where we find our spring,
So.

After singing Kokomo (there’s PBR’s in there somewhere), we drive onward upward onto Kanan road,
And at the dead of night,
The deadest before Dawn,
We mistake the moon for the 5 PM we used to know two hours ago and suddenly my bumper’s not falling off like it used to (You’d pulled over and fixed it while I napped through the blink of an eye) and when I woke we were flying and you were talking about barnacles in Massachusetts.

There’s no longer a light to the heat but lower the window, see?
It feels like it’s still there. It now brims and breathes, but from below, the peddled ground, you feel it don’t you, it’s become what made it so?

On the way after our dip at the Century Reservoir,
You’re sure to stop for some slushees and airplane liquor to quench my lungs from the American Spirit that scorched my breath a pack ago today.
I hold your hand and you
My crotch. Your grip’s a kiss,
Mine’s
Raspberry lisps
As we’re driving onward through the Mojave,
Towards the snows of Colorado and you’re driving,
the thoughts of ski lifts
and thrusts in some hot tub keep our eyes ahead of what’s already become of us now,
In this moment here,
driving towards the fires
In the skies,

of California.