Running with a Heart on Fire

Palm trees give way to rolling green hills, smells of the sea, bridges for miles, careen into the Bay with giddy faces and sunshine on stacked white lego houses. You remember the city through a fog, one long, strange, drunken rampage and you don't know where you woke up, only that you sat at the airport feeling bowled over the next day. We took a ferry out across the waters, looked at a prison in the middle of the ocean, ate ice cream in Marin county where the money pretends to be laid back. While waiting to dock back at the port of San Francisco, you tell them maybe I should move to California, but you know as well as anyone New York always pulls you home. Later, during the encores, you look around the sold out theater and think how West Coast they all are and you want nothing to do with it. Close your eyes and listen to the last fading lines of the chorus, let the audience take their pictures and ask timidly for signatures, sit on a tour bus drinking rider wine and saying farewell to the opening act before they drag their instruments back down another steep hill and wait for departure. Curl up in the cot where time cannot touch you. Wake up to the sounds of the road again, underneath your bones.