Rhapsody for Angels

Los Angeles (part of it) as seen from the Getty Center

This town is restless;

relentless.

 

Glowing bright from the aggregate

of millions of individual souls

burning themselves out.

Some burn brighter than others.

Come for the dreams, stay for the work.

 

It’s a blue collar town.

Our nouveau riche pay top dollar

to manicurists

who scrape the shit and dirt out

of recently ascendant fingernails.

 

Our lowest gutters are steps away

from our loftiest heights,

and the transition between the two

(or complete lack thereof)

has driven people mad.

 

It’s a citadel with self-healing teflon walls.

And there are walls within walls.

It is a zigurat;

a tower of Babel;

a temple of the profane and a sanctified bordello.

 

It’s a western town.

Wild,

uncontainable as all outdoors,

sprawling

endlessly.

It won’t be fenced in.

 

It’s a storyteller’s town. A myth-maker’s town.

An unreliable narrator.

 

It’s a town that everyone

who has never been here

knows everything about,

and those who call it home

will never fully understand.

 

It’s a town where

the idea of the place

lives simultaneously with

the reality,

and the two may overlap at points

or stay

galaxies

apart.

 

This town will give you blisters,

but you’ll never walk anywhere.

 

This town will stay with me

like a limp

or an accent.

 

It may take a lifetime

to fully appreciate

everything it has given,

and everything it has taken away.

 

This town is just a place

on a map,

not some mythological land,

or “wretched hive.”

 

And for we lucky few,

even for the briefest of moments,

it’s been a home.