How many have handed over their religions?
Come empty fences come power-lines,
TVs all promising the fall-out won’t make landfall.
I’ve been in rooms full of people while they haunt themselves
with the forest-fire sunsets of Arizona.
And we share the same disease, sincerely,
they’ve never slept very well.
By which I mean their elegance was in dying artfully,
all blossoms on the stem, all violet and mercury.
You see these apparitions?
Fuck, look at it, the hanging of innocent men on the coast
suspended in marble in the light from outside.
In the event of nuclear war we must understand
the most beautiful word is existence
and believe then that our sailors will return from the sea
like astronauts
younger and without a god.
Jaime Garcia is a 23-year-old Californian.