Country song

Pain branching out from my lap
   as I sit
     and drink tea.

A thunderstorm is wracking 

 the bowl

  of my belly

like a tornado whipping apart the midwest.

Travel  

  further   

     South

        for a clime

of snowy cold 

white 

feet. 

All clear, calm, and arid in the chest, 

and my head, the West Coast,

mild and mediterranean. 

A whole country of weather. 

A whole corpus of discomfort.

Beautiful bells tingle

outside my window. 

They are rolling over the sound 

of clothes turning in the washing machine, 

and over the traffic, 

which streaks like a white smear of paint 

across my consciousness 

as it has my entire life as an Angeleno. 

A child raised beside the freeway

that reminds her of the ocean. 

She is happily

listening into the bad seashell

for the truth, and hearing it. 

I can't live here anymore, it seems,

But that doesn't matter.
I have no choice,

as much as that isn't true. 

I'm so crushed I can't raise myself up

to be reasonable anymore. 

This is when the angels typically step in,

and maybe they will. 

But they have to believe me, 

and they know me better 

than I've ever known anyone.

Would it be fun to go back to doubt?

To cry in a dark room of life

helplessly and hopelessly

believing in nothing but the dark?

The awareness of the lightswitch makes it all seem silly.

Just flip on the light. 

It's a shame it's so binary.

Some have dimmers.

Oh well, whatever. I don't even know

what or who I'm talking to

anymore or why I write 

what I feel so passionately

I must write. It has something to do 

with recording the weather of my pain. 

That if I can get it down, 

then yes, it can be seen as a system

worthy of a report. 

That all I feel has an effect

and an impact on my body

and other bodies like the weather

does on Earth.