California

[first typed version]

Today California feels like exile, like an island:
oceans between me and almost everything I love.

California is a word I kept
seeing on T-shirts and baseball caps in Europe

worn by people who wouldn't know better.
The weather has tilted and my loneliness

is the colors of autumn. I miss
the metric system, a country where Celsius

isn't an energy drink. It's 4pm Pacific. An echoing,
almost empty hour, an hour when most people

I know are sleeping.

Rather liked the Aeropress pushing down, the pretending to dissolve the time difference (if only!)... could it be brought back in, or will that seem too forced/twee? Also, the barber/bathhouse thing at the end of the handwritten draft is a little bit random but also kind of cool; maybe it speaks to a longing for a Roman haircut/an errand done so much more easily in a big city like Rome (remember how many barbershops you saw!) than in a place like rural, expansive (and expensive) Mendocino County, California. But I think the biggest issue with this poem is its central conceit... you say California feels like exile/an island and that feeling is certainly genuine, real, deeply felt (and sure you have ties and affinities to other parts of the world – as well as the metric system etc. lol) BUT California is still also a place where you have history, and a home, and where there are people, things, places, attitudes etc. that you love and care about. That doesn't come through at all in either draft... does it need to? Is it disingenuous? The poem is trying to capture a specific internal, emotional landscape at a specific point in time. Maybe the fact you introduce the poem with "Today" (almost as it if it's a caveat, the way things are right now, as opposed to previously or in the future) is enough.