Beware a woman wearing jeans with a dead flower on her pocket
She schemes in black & white but wants colored things
Wears a sailor’s traditional hat on weekends but never roughed the sea
It is for these reasons she smells mostly like Whole Foods
Speaks French as a second language & signs her name with a heart above the “I”
In school she was the one you could go to for weed because her brother
Still drove that Camaro he kept going with magic & metal through the grunge rock days
And still, you’ve made out with her at the end of the party, last kiss of the night
Both sitting there discussing philosophy not realizing that by the very act of discussing this philosophy
You were undoing its foundation & making a case for existentialism
Which is precisely the reason flowers belong in pots
© Adam Bresson

On June 20, 2008, I featured at Rapp Saloon, a reading at the hostel in Santa Monica, CA. I read six pieces: “Our love was powerful like a rap video…”, “O Grandmother, protect us & your memory…”, “What you have inside of you must feel like black & dust…”, “Rocks glass fragmenting into stars & stars…”, “Portland is a full-bellied rivertown, round gut, sitting long on its lancing…” and “Starting in the middle of a lingering late night crowd out loud…” Please visit www.adambresson.org for more poetry and writing. Hope you enjoy!

You hold dearly the sage-colored earthen coffee cup without handles
in your hands with short fingernails. Introduce me to
Japanese Gyokuro fine green tea which made long centuries ageless.

Tell me stories of hiking up the mountains North Face backpack black
with no particular destination miles above a quiet tanakamura. Planned for tucked away
places to look out on a city defined by crowded houses & right angles.

Drinking Yona Yona Ale & ambling the narrow streets at night
looking for friends in the alley & a variety of storefronts.
Setting the terms of your loneliness into wet cobblestone.

Taking the bullet train shooting to Kyoto past fields of lime leaves
swaying to the passing wind. Stone steps to a Buddhist temple to
throw fire at statues almost alive & ask for home.

You wrote your romance down on long, narrow strips of paper on a roll
for Tanabata in July, hanging them from bamboo branches in the forest
with a handmade ornament from Nepal to unite the stars so very distant.

And still you found time to plant gardens with stones arranged carefully in the dirt
for the maximum flow of thought & the stoppage of time. Light the forever flame
in a stone lantern. Balance a drop of water. Take the bridge to the island you made.

And all of this brought you back to me. May have taken years or months but
we will sip Bancha tea out of a cup chosen from our collection of mismatched
accessories & talk late into the night about Far East lands.

I love that you travel in circles.
© Adam Bresson