Escapes...

In 2007 Forbes Magazine labeled San Francisco as the Number One City in America for Singles...it honestly bears repeating their words:

Endowed with a cinematic cityscape, a magnetic economy and the most sexually tolerant population this side of Amsterdam, the City by the Bay is perfectly conducive to solo satisfaction.

I get the cityscape...tall lumbering mountains surrounding a delicate soil bereft with memories of earthquakes, fires and drama....gold rush and all that.  

I get the economy with its proximity to Silicon Valley...Apple, Facebook investors, Hewlett Packard, Cisco (god a company named for the city) and others...

But I also find intriguing the mixing bowl here...the asian influence, the gay influence...the hedonism factor.  It's not cloying or in your face.  But like a duvet cover it is revealing...but not enough to reveal the underneath.

It is a city of remarkable beauty...at every step, at every corner.  And the irony of it is in the heightened views, in the best marked places, the city gazes at a prison on a piece of rock.

Since 1933 the world's worst prisoners have loitered there, an inescapable place...and indescribable place.

Prison...handcuffs, looking bleaking outwardly to a city perched on bluffs and mountainscapes...

I know exactly how they feel, how they lament.  I know the cold water shoals that keep me from the lights.

I feel the tidal currents that splay and scurry across the shallows, portending deeper waters that are darker and pull one down in a swallow.

I've seen this before.

I've felt the rusted chain of connecting to you, feeling you, exposing and learning about you...to only find the cell door slammed closed tightly.  The loss of a connection, abruptness.

I remember a gaze to a city of lights, to a city outside my reach.

I walked the streets, the sidewalks, saw immense beauty, a constant and changing mix of ethnicity that beguiled and belabored...the stratosphere of looks and gazes, scents and smells.

But me?

I only longed for one.

I only stayed for one.

I held my cell, chained to my one wall, kept my small view of the window as just a shape...I longed for more.

I kept a picture unerasable in my mind.  It was carved with a nail into stone...it was bloody by the time it was finished.

I kept quiet and steadfast...I wasn't about to go anywhere.

Yet I encountered and engaged and discussed and dissected and I compared...

I compared the bit of you to the thousands that came and went...and in the end, I stayed locked and ensured the chains were tight.  I wasn't going anywhere.

I assume I did my crime...and now I will do my time.

And I will look out upon the mornings...and more importantly in this west coast town the evenings...where I can boast of comparing you to the colors that come each evening...and try as they may...try as God goes all impressionistic in the west with his colors and his blurrings...

he will never quite capture the image of you that I have and I hold.

That chains me forever to this rock of concrete and rusted iron.