May 2023
Los Angeles is a poem. Each neighborhood a new stanza. Every person a walking metaphor. A poem doesn’t have to have a plot or a storyline; it just has to read beautifully; it just has to make you think.
Los Angeles is a lot of things. It’s seeing eight cheap versions of Spiderman on one block on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s having a 1.7 mile drive take 30 minutes. It’s having 20 dispensaries and sushi restaurants on one street. It’s a seagull eating your $17 sandwich you got from Mendocino Farms. It’s nobody knowing how to drive the second it starts drizzling. It’s sunshine. It’s also unwavering heat in the San Fernando Valley during the summer. It’s understanding that fire season is at its peak during the Fall. It’s a home to wannabe actors, singers, and producers. But it’s also been my home for 22 years. And throughout those 22 years, I’ve come to the realization that this poem of a city will never stop writing itself.
There are too many line breaks. Too much separation between the Los Angeles I grew up in and the Los Angeles I’m living in now. The stanzas are getting full. The meter doesn’t line up anymore. The prose is superficial. With every new metaphor and simile, it seems to delete the previous words on the page. Whole stanzas can no longer find their place in the poem that was once theirs. They are relocated, edited, and deleted.
Los Angeles is the capital of materialism and superficialness. You have a reputation, and you don’t fail to let people forget that. The rhythm of your poem keeps being thrown off. You lose a good pattern and develop a new one, evolving with the people that flock in and out to a follow a dream and then, put it to bed. Your pattern is busted. Your rhymes used to smell of ocean salt, citrus, and sunscreen. Your rhymes now smell like trash, pollution, and too much perfume. I miss how you used to rhyme.
I have grown and changed with you over the last 22 years, familiarizing myself with your different pockets. I know the San Fernando Valley like the back of my hand. I’m tellin’ ya, the place is just one large square! I was there for my local parks transition from grass to AstroTurf. It’s like they decided to plastic surgery the fucking ground! I prefer the dirt clumps on the back of my jeans to the crumb rubber. I was there when Borders Bookstore on Ventura Boulevard got changed to a TJ Maxx. How helpful. When a Starbucks didn’t make it, so they opened a new hip coffee shop. Can you imagine that? Starbucks. Being bought out. I love the plethora of parking in the valley. How traffic never really gets that bad. How people aren’t really that judgmental because the SFV gets a bad rep, and so, it’s not the most desirable spot for transplants. In high school I would spend a lot of time in Brentwood and the Palisades, since most, if not all my friends lived on the West Side. The second I crossed the 405 was the second I experienced culture shock within this bubble of a city. The West Side is ultimately home to what people think of when they think of Los Angeles. Green juice. Dogs in strollers. Health stores. It’s a part of Los Angeles I wasn’t used to but have grown to love.
When college came around, I decided on USC. I think about 30 kids from my high school class ended up at USC. It sort of feels like a glorified version of my high school at times, and that can be nice, for nostalgic perks, but I like to think I’ve strayed from that scene. I don’t have the same excitement as someone who has moved here for school, yet I’m trying to rediscover this city from a new perspective. Of course, that doesn’t mean I can erase what I already know, love, and hate. But it means exploring neighborhoods I haven’t spent quite a lot of time in and forming new opinions.
How I wish I could write this ode as someone who just moved to this city. How I wish I could experience my favorite aspects of Los Angeles for the first time again. How I wish I could write this with childlike wonder. And if I could, it would sound like I’m in love. This sentiment I write about reminds me a lot of a Sleater-Kinney lyric. In their song “Method,” they sing “I’m singing about love. But it’s coming out like hate.” You cannot produce this many metaphors for a place you hate. And truth be told, as hateful as I sound, I find myself falling in love with you, your quirks, and flaws, more and more every day.
People see you through books, music, and movies. I can’t help but be its biggest critic. They only ever show the first layer of fat, for you to skim off the top. For you to romanticize. Nothing of substance. Nothing flavorful. Nothing that shows Los Angeles for what it is.
I used to love to read you. Now I dread what you might potentially write. I hope your metaphors are based in your natural elements, not in the people that love you for everything you’re not. I hope your stanzas are appreciative of your history, not what’s being built on top of it.
Not everybody in this city can be a Joan Didion or a Charles Bukowski, or an Aldous Huxley. Not everybody is going to make it. That’s fine. Keep writing. Keep being inspired. Keep the creativity flowing the same way that one piece of garbage you left behind at the beach ducks in and out of the ocean. But in the process of doing that, don’t try to change a city with so much history. Los Angeles is ever-changing with fads and trends and people. Los Angeles changes you. You don’t get to change it.
You don’t get to write the poem; Los Angeles writes itself.
