Los Angeles Is Yours

Precious artifacts on tapestry carpet unfurled, glittering silver suns
Arrayed on articulated vine embroidery where the desert meets
The audience of the sea. Building towers pointing at her in the
Golden sun’s hours, foundations burgeoning beneath stone’s
Weight unfurling while gravity holds them down. And
The treasures are arrayed in the maze of mazes, all threads
Raveled in a patchwork quilt’s traveling on the back of
An articulate bum. Seashore bazaar in the suburbs, all
These wives and their murderers are driving down the
Hours of their black employment sitting in their broken seats.

The trumpets calling elephants from beyond the boulders
Locked in mountains, Hannibal’s army marches upon
This desert town. All the worries of this frail city hurried
Towards the spark that would burn it down.

Here I lay in the street’s enclave,
Women screaming, children singing
And men rushing with rifles to the edge
Of her ancient frown. Dionysus locked
In castles, see him turn his jailer’s key around.
Someone’s laughing, someone’s choking,
Someone’s breaking the wrought iron gates
Down to save Persephone, to save this city,
To break the spiral inset and working like
An oil drill through slate and down.

View the sparrow’s flag flapping from the hotel’s balcony
View the ships blown like errant gears across the floor of the ocean’s surface
View the giant fuck up with a shallow button connected to Frankenstein’s
Electronic neck, see the fire billow freeways into slate dust and chrome flakes.
View the ancient paintings metaphorical with flowers lost upon the lake, floating
Like billowing sailboats painted with watercolor sails, view the shorthand curse
Scratched upon the halls of the Navy, and view the hopeless barren street with
Investment bankers sprawled out, choking on their ties.

You are the summer, my quickly seated lover, fired in my breast.
You are the summer, my articulated brother, toasting for your best.

Aircraft pointing at frail architectures, windows billowing with flames splattered
Across the edges of Sunday, hearing damaged and black aircraft with no advantage
Shooting bullets at the cargo trains as they chortle by.

Oh hunger and violins
We fall into stars with both of us laughing,
We are what we see, the svelte accommodations
Of clothing’s posture, we’ve howled through
Night and burnt like magnesium through the day.
We’ve made our own shapes from the earthen clay
And been blown kisses from the slimming wind.

Candles and lanterns, campfires and natural desires,
Let me explain the calendar lies bought by the police
That told you a false year, that sold you a fear.
Let the candles begin, let the lanterns singe the
Fringes of darkness.

And I was born under the same star that you knew,
The one that pollution couldn’t block out
The one that shone in our eyes when we walked out.