The temperature in our apartment
is always moderate,
20 Celsius, or as our friends in
San Francisco call it, 68, never too frigid,
too torrid, as pleasant as its people
who birthed a twentieth-
century love of gay and poetry,
where Ginsberg howled
and Ferlinghetti kept the city
lights plugged in,
grateful for their dead, their '67
just a narrow notch
before some elusive ideal
that hovers within our reach.
You tell me to never touch
the thermostat and I acquiesce.
What we call warmth is but the middle,
the center of some utopia
absent of fire and of ice.
Yes, the ground there occasionally
quakes, much like our walls and
ceiling do whenever the tenants
upstairs argue about the bills
or break into a dance
we've been curious to behold.
Andreas Gripp
Andreas Gripp
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