All is honoring.
Mauve paint is all that remains at Union Station
Of the golden age,
When they thought there was a such a thing.
Palms always make thing seem more Egyptian.
The prison's so decrepit there's no graffiti
Save the ubiquitous Omar.
The tag rainbows under the bridge,
Distended nonsensical names,
But it's who can bring the brown:
Rewlpawn Peek Fun.
And then the junkyard barbed edges mashed to squares
As harmless as boxes
(But not those piled with intent in the back
By the hydrochloric acid truck).
The tire strips, the grey road cones, the upturned
Port O Potty
By the La Brea Tar Pits Mobile Museum.
City of Vernon again, world's largest loading dock,
Where containers are like children to be hauled away.
The respectable here is deadly, only the silver illegal gleams:
Run It Pimp Bone Envoy.
Ringling Brothers diesel trucks
Hide behind crates.
The cranes, the gravel mounds,
The sculptured shubbery
And petrol horsies.
Quiz Drip Soon LSD PhD:
It's an election year so everyone shows up
But they are only drinking from coffee cups anyway.
The tracks are here to connect with the storage units,
The only cargo to see here is the Pillsbury Dough Boy
Bags stuffing the dumpsters.
A stray triangle is reserved
For an emporium of trash,
A barely hanging tented flap,
Fit backyard for a wilderperson.
You can't keep the weeds away, not here,
They must bloom purple and quiver in the air,
So unlike the line up the stairs with lunch
Duffel bags and a look
That gets farther away the closer they get
To their homes.
Suns Daze Grue Byfar:
The private jets sit in public display
With weeds through the runway.
That fast food shack that looks like an old
Switch house on the railyard
Has been stripped of its medallion and its menu,
But its brave orange color remains.
Goom Spexer Sha:
More names that are imagined, for the real ones
Are too fey,
Too fake, too unoriginal
For Fullerton, home of the blues and Service Roofing,
Where cartoon brands that wish fulfilled the 50's
Are restored in a diner where nostalgia
Is the draw,
As if that's what was real, not who we were
When faced with the mystical Chiquita banana girl.
Shadows on the tracks scares the brakeman into stopping,
Which allows me to see a bicycle for a dwarf
Imbedded in a steel mesh fence
Like a goo-legged fly in a spider's web.
The wood is wrapped by Paramount Platinum,
No one knows what the Disaster Recovery trucks are for.
The Grove is here too,
And no one really knows why on old roller palace
Serves coffee now.
When the car can't be driven it goes on the roof.
When house can't be rescued there are bins of refuse
Behind the circular wire
Like a razor zodiac that spins through the sky.
I know this town, but it is only a few steps inside
In a few matching doors ...
All this can be replaced in my mind
And it has.
At Palmyra Mini-Storage there are toolsheds as big
As owl barns
And houses as tiny as toolsheds —
There's some symmetry there unknown to those
Who don't travel,
And see in changing patterns
The way all fixity goes.
