“the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” —Humphrey Bogart, ‘Casablanca’

My heaven is / the cosmos is what all that space was built for.

“the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” —Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca

hard disagree, fam.

Etta James blares & curdles “I’d Rather Go Blind” at Montreaux, live, alive & I’m 3 beers in with love & love angst we are getting a new couch it is ours to share & delight the mess in the apartment

is our mess I’d rather go blind than see our parents their exceptional boomer rise to the top of constructed fantasies & why even diss it, every dream is tool by tool built no God illuminated it is cold in LA & cuffin’ season & we are equally uncuffed candles burn in separate rooms uninterrupted

fire for days see your & I’ve not wanted to see before a tender pulse you gotta talk to your plants you gotta clean your crystals you gotta tell the ones you love that you love them baby,

baby, I’d rather be blind that to see you walk away from me upkeep & El Camino low riders of feeling

a shared space for a social species is heaven the one I dream of entering I got

a bone to pick with folk saying this don’t matter I got whole skulls & cadavers to pick with certain astrophysicists who tell me we are a fraction of a nothing compared to space time not cause

they’re right & I know they’re right just cause how can Etta James & all her baby, baby,

baby our new couch, the bitter air & random mosquitoes still sucking at my ankles lost in my room from July the perfect night for a cold beer in a warm home the cuddleless Tuesday still to the brim

with a wild & true love I’m like nah. My heaven is

the cosmos is what all that space was built for. What if all that infinite & uncomprehending time all them atoms electrons colliding with their other halves until one didn’t

& exploded the balance of canceling each other out ruined releasing life if the universe or universes are built on this unrequited love then this surely this

my friend & Etta James & our life stories incense swaying memory asking when was the last time either of us slow danced I mean come on.

It amounts.

And sure, this world is crazy: the people & their unprocessed. I won’t even with all that. But dammit if it don’t mean something. If this ain’t already the point. Etta James, I just don’t even

wanna be free & that’s what I don’t know about. It being type-ableist aside, that she’d rather be blind than see all this.