open letter to LA

Where do I begin with you, oh fey labirynth of rot?
Should I describe your sinister automobiles, choking
travel with the gaseous excrement of dinosaurs,
screaming horn cacophony in accident spectacles
as boring as your movies and as fatal as your gentrification?
I might.
But I am waiting in a line again
to fly I am waiting in a line again
to become young a second time
while your aristocrats pay to have
their faces pulled back in adolescent
surgeries, while your millionaire housewives
slip poison into their lips to appear kissable
on yachts that circle shallow waters like
stupid sharks, filled with serated discourse
that moves in social circles around a foaming,
thrashing, bleeding prey. Do you recognize
that prey as the poor, or just as another
blood sport designed for callow entertainment
when your high definition television is speaking
in low qualification about the virtues of your narcissism?
Call me cynical call me with your ipod
but don't call me a liar
because I was born here and have left your letters
unanswered, crumpled by candle flame,
sodden in wine and destroyed as perfectly
as your puerile construction, your juvenille
re-construction, that raises rents
and causes rents in the breastbone
of my checking account with your blade
outlined smile that laughs like a wound
I had once when I didn't know how to love.
To call you a jungle invokes too much beauty,
you are most literally a desert
filled with corpses created by the
never-ending battle that goes unnoticed
except by your most insane, the newscasters
calmly asking you to accept police-gang
shootings as if there was a difference
besides the colors, cars, and uniforms.
There is more, so much more, your foreclosures
and misleading banks that drawn families
into rat motel housing filled with asbestoes
and antibiotic laced water, there are your
billboards bursting with utopia over
brimstone vistas choked with factory soot,
there are your dead you never honor
and your living that you never observe.
Too many numbers, not enough color,
rape sold in the liquour store and
racism bought in real estate,
I know you have no memory but I am
hoping that this letter sticks in your storm
drain and is picked up by a passing gull,
who will drop it on your filthy bureaucrats
so that its sewer water will only make them
more clean.
Superficially Yours,
Steven, South Bay Son