I get Los Angeles. Ugly. Hard to get around. Congested. "The" prefaced numbered highways we all knew arithmatically.

Local dialect. Valet parking.

Crime. Bars on windows and doors.

The hyper-rich dangling baubles before the unwashed masses in the soft night air.

Lights shimmering all the way to the horizon while you stand on the deck at a mountainside house whose owner you've never met, and whose name you've never learned,

Whose booze you're drinking.

Less careful tipsy women, black bra straps dangling across triceps, wondering who you are but handing a business card - just in case,

You turn out,

To be, somebody.

Who needs a singer.

It can't be LA that people love. It's the idea that your dreams could turn this grime into clouds.

A pianist sits at a keyboard anywhere and plays. That's the idea of it.

And the idea of LA is the idea of yourself in sunglassed day blare,

Sipping sumatran lattes in a palm treed shade grid

Possessing unimpeachable value that the world will come to know.

Even though the unimpeachable value is unerasably always.

It's the idea the world you stand before - and reach to play is the same you,

DNA-new pounding keys in mom's basement,

But age perfected and amplified.

It's big city extreme. It's LA where everything happens loud,

Everything you've wished for converted to real lies you want so to believe,

While denying your wishing was just a little off.

Ignoring all the wisdom of the ages is what youthful does.

And so wishing for things you've imagined but could never live creates unintended outcomes,

You could have never known.

Which all the good sharks know.

They're circling, looking for singers.

 

---

 

She was brave when I met her.

Not reckless,

She assured me she'd thought hard about every leap.

All I saw was the falling.

She loved being muddy and called out the climbing trees from the just plain

Leafy ones.

She'd read all the novels and poems I saw other college kids reading

And when I asked her what it said there

She answered in codes and parrots and lemurs and paintings by Vermeer.

From deep within my quantum mechanics all I could feel was falling.

What I didn't know, didn't hurt me.

In Antarctica there are no bugs.

Turned out she was afraid of spiders

Possibly snakes. 

She wanted things I never would,

Dance and watch ballet.

I wanted the magic between atoms.

We got

Love

which is never what you want,

but the destroying god

who levels the world,

annhilates the brave and the weak, the spiders and magic

And leaves you on the endless cold white

to build your own

joyous falling everything.

 

 


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