Cinder

When I drive down Kaiser,

and the sun beats me with it's tiny fractured waves,

I squint.

Stretched and sovereign, on the shoulder, limbs extend pas the normal frame. There is smoke fuming out of the Volvo, which I don't drive or ever did.  Everything is green out here, that sharp florescent green, like algae in a dirty fish bowl, and I don't fit in.

I can't

No, I don't apprehend my apprehensions.

I play dead, nod and stay quiet.

On the inside, I remind myself and count things, and stay very quiet. Like a nationless soldier on a battlefield,

squinting.

The sun is a sweaty ball of blindness, above an empirical sky. These messy feelings, pushed through a sieve of math and order. The sun was like a big hug, but after the atmosphere and the ozone layer, it has become these rays of sun, this energy which for some reason bothers me.

I sit down, and I realize I can't see straight because I couldn't see straight. One can't replace another, like a flamingo and a ballerina, two different forms of elegance, so I sit down on the hood of the car, while my driver is arguing with some person on his phone, yakking about a faulty part. I close my eyes and breathe, and hear a bird chirp, succeeded by a flock, and the sudden vacuum of engines and wheels approach in front of me.

An effecting helicopter of four windows, two all the way, two as children would, and they are young and tan honest lovers, with foreign hairdos and exotic postures. They seem strange and somewhat reassuring. But then I realize they just live on campus and have too much time on their hands. They are wearing sunglasses.

Maybe,

If I wore sunglasses, I could relax.

Maybe,

If I had more money, I would have better friends, or at least more of them. They would have a much higher chance of being better. Whatever that means.

My friends now are either distant or in the process of becoming distant, emotionally incomprehensible, or more commonly, simply missing. Nobody has heard from some people.

 I don't know. I could just clone my old friends, I can imagine them emerging from cellars with mist and carbon and all sorts of sciency things like Urkel turning into Stefan. But that would be hopeless, a failure, an abysmal mess. I mostly miss having somewhere to go when I had to be able to say I had somewhere to go, so it didn't look like I had didn't have anywhere to go, and now none of that exists. Nobody cares. And that is much worse, or much better, depending on my situation.

But money doesn't buy happiness. Money buys friends and exotic unnecessary material things, which brings material happiness. Which dies as assuredly as friends do.

But I am sitting,

on my hood,

staring at a picture,

I should've taken.

The car is busted, the smoke is this resultant without ash, without a profit. And I just wish I could wear some sunglasses.

Things would be different,

I am not meant to be a poet.

Maybe a domesticated animal, waiting for praise and belly rubs, with fingers outstretched and popping, my voice whistling with the birds and the falling leaves of a rain forest. 

At least, one with a suntan, and an expensive pair of sunglasses.