2 cigarettes and maybe 20 minutes

The moon flooded my eyes
she did
light wave after another
pounding the receptors and cones
with pure white

Shielding the ember from the summer eve's mouth
the orange ash politely radiated the inside of my hand
with heat
and in the miles below me
a hundred thousand embers also smoldered

The line of demarcation between the two worlds
one ruled by pack mentality and howls
shrieking, echoing
and the other in organized squares
with approximately straight lines
and wavy heat rising from it

I was happily in purgatory
not nature, not society
wanting to be left alone by all

To mend my wounds on my own
to feel the night like any human being in past
breathe deep and explain the taste
for myself

Like the thousands of families
each with their own little lamp
the darkness my disguise
the moon my revealer

There is so much beauty in a California summer night
on the gently cooling
dusty foothills of a mountain

Rose Street is an empty cul-de-sac
where I shared a cigarette or two with the night
a small row of vacant lots
left void by recessionomics

It was there I made a sanctuary
against a backdrop of man and God made glory
I drank it all in
waving my hands across it like a fireplace

Yet, my shoulders drew cold
Adam's desire still burning in his most pathetic of kin
My Eden, a stalled housing development