To the person I once was,

As our eagle first dipped its wings, I expected the still water to break into a tumultuous underbelly of rugged urbanism. Rather, mountains shone on my left- long and dramatic gods that shook the sky and reverberated for miles. As the plane tilted right, columns of pigment stood in wavering lines. Brush stroke trees and cement pillars rounded the edges of the wild coral. The plane evened its pace. Cord from each side wrapped my rib cage. The enormity of what I had just smelled threatened to rip me in half: the musical ebb of the city and the mountains that served as a lip, so the precious drink would not spill over. Drunkenly, I stumbled out of the plane and bore into warm, pink waters.

As vast as the land, yet each tone seems familiar only to each other.

Perfectly dimpled like a lime, ethereal walls wiggle upwards

In organically rigid stretches.

Atop, gardens unfurl like smoke stacks,

Lightbulb lemons kiss the ever-blue sky as

Drying laundry struggles in its drying cage, begging to melt into the wind.

Every color sings to each other in

Perfect disunion.

As ethereal boxes cave, concentric boxes

Reveal decaying boxes.

A multiplicity, an ode to the living

One thousand car alarms chant their praise upon twelve tolls of an hourly bell.

This city does not raucously call nor hum.

A car’s gunshot begs for the response of

A stray dog, who marinates the sunshine

With a howl, a city-wide call and response.

A couple argues in the street, but I can only hear singing.

Laughter blends with the car’s thumping glide.

This is not music, for none of these instruments even belong in the same world.

It is through a closeness of all things that such a beauty is achieved.

That such distinction might blend into one harmonious trophy of what man truly is.

I feel like Cortez.