Good Words for Los Angeles

Not enough and too many all at once

Photo by Brandi Alexandra on Unsplash

I wrote a very long and self indulgent piece about my personal reaction to the wildfires. And then I deleted it because nobody needs that right now. I’m not a memoirist FFS.

This post is for Los Angeles, the dreams that have been buried under rubble and debris, and the hopes that are being excavated and revived. I bring you 1 small passage and 2 longer poems that celebrate this complicated, beautiful city. Thank you to everyone who has checked in and helped in any way. 💙

On to the good words…

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!” ― John Fante

LOVE POEM TO LOS ANGELES
By: Luis J. Rodriguez

with a respectful nod to Jack Hirschman

1.
To say I love Los Angeles is to say
I love its shadows and nightlights,
its meandering streets,
the stretch of sunset-colored beaches.
It’s to say I love the squawking wild parrots,
the palm trees that fail to topple in robust winds,
that within a half hour of L.A.’s center
you can cavort in snow, deserts, mountains, beaches.
This is a multi-layered city,
unceremoniously built on hills,
valleys, ravines.
Flying into Burbank airport in the day,
you observe gradations of trees and earth.
A “city” seems to be an afterthought,
skyscrapers popping up from the greenery,
guarded by the mighty San Gabriels.

2.
Layers of history reach deep,
run red, scarring the soul of the city,
a land where Chinese were lynched,
Mexican resistance fighters hounded,
workers and immigrants exploited,
Japanese removed to concentration camps,
blacks forced from farmlands in the South,
then segregated, diminished.
Here also are blessed native lands,
where first peoples like the Tataviam and Tongva
bonded with nature’s gifts;
people of peace, deep stature, loving hands.
Yet for all my love
I also abhor the “poison” time,
starting with Spanish settlers, the Missions,
where 80 percent of natives
who lived and worked in them died,
to the ruthless murder of Indians
during and after the Gold Rush,
the worst slaughter of tribes in the country.
From all manner of uprisings,
a city of acceptance began to emerge.
This is “riot city” after all—
more civil disturbances in Los Angeles
in the past hundred years
than any other city.

3.
To truly love L.A. you have to see it
with different eyes,
askew perhaps,
beyond the fantasy-induced Hollywood spectacles.
“El Lay” is also known
for the most violent street gangs,
the largest Skid Row,
the greatest number of poor.
Yet I loved L.A.
even during heroin-induced nods
or running down rain-soaked alleys or getting shot at.
Even when I slept in abandoned cars,
alongside the “concrete” river,
and during all-night movie showings
in downtown Art Deco theaters.
The city beckoned as I tried to escape
the prison-like grip of its shallowness,
sun-soaked image, suburban quiet,
all disarming,
hiding the murderous heart
that can beat at its center.
L.A. is also lovers’ embraces,
the most magnificent lies,
the largest commercial ports,
graveyard shifts,
poetry readings,
murals,
lowriding culture,
skateboarding,
a sound that hybridized
black, Mexican, as well as Asian
and white migrant cultures.
You wouldn’t have musicians like
Ritchie Valens, The Doors, War,
Los Lobos, Charles Wright &
the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band,
Hiroshima, Motley Crue, NWA, or Quetzal
without Los Angeles.
Or John Fante, Chester Himes, Charles Bukowski,
Marisela Norte, and Wanda Coleman as its jester poets.

4.
I love L.A., I can’t forget its smells,
I love to make love in L.A.,
it’s a great city, a city without a handle,
the world’s most mixed metropolis,
of intolerance and divisions,
how I love it, how I hate it,
Zootsuit “riots,”
can’t stay away,
city of hungers, city of angers,
Ruben Salazar, Rodney King,
I’d like to kick its face in,
bone city, dried blood on walls,
wildfires, taunting dove wails,
car fumes and oil derricks,
water thievery,
with every industry possible
and still a “one-industry town,”
lined by those majestic palm trees
and like its people
with solid roots, supple trunks,
resilient.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016
Tribute to Angelenos

Los Angeles, Fin de Siècle
BY MAURYA SIMON

Delirium in the downtown mall today:
      Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
            sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,

“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
      you were marvelous, simply marvelous.”
            Outside, evening lies down flat

like a Hindu fakir on its bed of nails.
      Smog homogenizes the golden air
            as clouds sweep by on blackened sails.

Under freeway columns, homeless men
      warm their dirty hands over rusty flames;
            a radio’s sputter, an old tom-tom drum,

an eyeless doll’s head, all skip-roll past
      into a gutter, to become flotsam and jetsam
            upon a river of oil-slicked trash.

And across town the reactor hums to itself.
      What song does it sing? Something
            about confusion and fission, or else

it mimics the melody of high officials,
      with its easy divinity, its double-talk.
            It’s a monolithic nightmare, still,

it's beloved by the masses, as is art.
      Indeed, a Van Gogh was bought today
            for twenty-one million, and in K-Mart

one may purchase t-shirts troubled by poor,
      peculiar Vincent’s pained and bandaged face.
            The inscription: Lend me your ear.

Inside the hospital beehives, the dreamless
      put off death with plastic surgery, if
            only superficially; but it’s enough.

“Save your soul for Christ,” brightly proclaims
      the sign beneath the Church of Holy Congress.
            The swallows still return to Capistrano

from northward, and soon we’ll have a cure
      for cancer, poverty, menstrual cramps, even
            for boredom, baldness, obesity, and fear.

The twenty-first century looms beyond sin,
      Geiger counters, gin, and cash register–
            gaunt, air-borne, computerized vision–

but meanwhile: fiestas and incense, serious joys
       sprouting like molds in unexpected places,
            the sorrow of laundromats, of so much noise.

Copyright Credit: Maurya Simon, "Los Angeles, Fin de Siècle" from Cartographies. Copyright © 2008 by Maurya Simon. Red Hen Press.

Here’s to a better week. See you at the end of the month.
Kayla