Felt It Coming or
What I Knew Before I Left
From the loving God who brought you The Secret and Carnivorism
Comes Santa Monica, the strange story of a liquid golden light pouring through the streets
Illumining it’s odd angels, descending from a sideways heaven. wrapped in discards, green plastic bags, clever boots
Made from water bottles (only the good kind, smart water and the like), a pastiche of civilized things,
Draped, cloth like, on the heads of disparate floating bands of people
Judaic nomads
Streaming across Biblical sands,
Slowly, with a plodding grace that makes them almost levitate.
Pushing carts or pullling them, or a busted, held by stockings suitcase
Are those my stockings- I glance out from the Goodwill greedily appraising the two dollar dress
It would last me, someone bought it from The Gap and gave it away
I slip so easily into a long, earthy looking sundress from some hopeful actress or mom who has a nice low house with a tastefully tricked out lawn, a house so small it can only fit the air of
Of clean white privilege
in Apartment therapy or reno'd houses in Venice Beach.
These yuppies can turn an infested crack house, l
anguishing in the relentless Western Sun
into someone’s miniscule dream mansion.
My dream mansion.
Grocery Shopping
I walk out of the Wild Oat, a grocery store which, even upon speaking it, stimulates my taste buds to replicate the rustic, natural savour of a bygone era or of people on a renovated deck somewhere who can afford a personal chef.
The thing you love about movies most is the light, and second the pretty toned people breaking up in that lovely light, making every moment, cinematic and real, you can touch it
Live in it, eat it, saturated colors in Southern or even Northern California, a deep stained glass window red dyed on a shirt bouncing on wooden floors so modern and honeyed brown you can smell the clean, organic sawdust and it makes you cry with joy
And everything - it’s important because it happened in that light, even the man who stood in front of me, attempting to undo his pants way down on Wilshire and fifth while I grabbed my friend’s hand and ran across the street, pulling us away from his public self loving filth, his shifty protest to a world that won’t remember or honor his tortured sex, his middle eastern face, his descent from the first civilizations, sand houses made in Ur.
Come on Michelle, What? Just come on.
A moment to be remembered because of that light
Living in the moment light, I am actually living
The light
And the empty streets and everywhere the ghosts of the privileged
The Beach
the drudge filled beach.
Upon which I frolic with my friend, and her boy, sun streaked soul twin to my own,
bikinis children and hair, l
ike a dream a moment, a moment of which you can say I am living. In it.
When we leave the water a thick black grime is attached to our feet. I
t’s a hard shell not my imagination. It must be scraped off and my Vegan friend shrugs it off
Her insides preserved, from foods so pure they are like embalming fluid
Impervious to decay.
These are the little things that invade my hyperactive gut
Those streaming nomadic angels, the calico stuffies studding the ungraspable view
The stunned ocean vista,
The rigid tight blondes whose erect and etched in faces, hardened from the sun, whose forward march in gymshoes on the sidewalk negates my brown existence
Their walk evicting me from a paradise in which they feel I don’t belong
These are the things that add to my baffling body chemistry
That stir a lament in my womb
Which rises up through me and out of my mouth to these unfortunate words to my husband
I hate LA
We must leave.
I hate this place
Even though my days are filled with the life of the gentired poor.
Free mommy and me’s and swim classes, a renovated, glassy library rand the sale bin at old navy, and roller blading
On the boardwalk pushing our stroller along
And free concerts at the farmer’s market, although it’s a five dollar apple is the magic fruit that reminds me that doom await’s - the gap between the have nots and the have,
I see the angels everywhere, God’s marauding band of rag tag misfits, pouring not from the sky, but from a slit in the side part of the unearthly So Cal horizon
The creeping post apocalyptic feeling, like a scene from Mad Max, except there is no
Liberating anglo saxon hero with powerful, imposing hair.
Only Mexicans and white people so dismantled by life their race has become another, grayed blending into the steel aluminum of old trash cans and frayed clothes, black men with hair that swrirls in unpicked tufts, some Willie Wonka wonderland that makes me toy with the idea of a story for my son- someone being whisked way to the magical kingdom on a black man’s head.
I tell my husband, do you see these people? More and more everyday. And how are we different?
Fingering the wealty cast offs at the second hand store,
picking through the free possibilities,
a party he covers or the premier of some ghastly Hollywood film, another friend stuffing whole meals in her bag at the matinee movies, so she doesn’t have to buy the museum
piece popcorn, under glass and lit like a diamond necklace in a French Jewelry store.
Sunny rent controlled apartments, covered in mold.
Everything is fine he says
But the hairs on my arm are sensate to only but what I feel
I figure out how to take a senior citizen acting class for free and
Get toys from my son’s cousins and the man at the seven eleven gives me flowers no charge as he does to all the ladies who wear dresses when they buy their trashy mags.
We are learning to live like foragers in a sunny tropical land
Maybe we should have stayed, and become the first third world in habiters in the First World
Melting in the liquid California Sun, into some sub Saharan or sub equatorial land in which the first colonialists laughed at their nakedness and marvelled at their Eden.
Pick fruit from the trees, aluminum from the streets, half eaten, whole grain sprouted bagels from the bin behind the Whole Food.
Those streaming angels, humbled, Aztec descendants reclaiming, in a mindless slow afternoon troll, their lost and conquered land.
I feel dread when I see them contrasted with
The reworked and leather porcelain skin
of the people who don’t even need rent control,
and the Fringe White,
who can’t afford botox and anything better than Pantene
and are no longer eligible for rent control, who wrap themselves in the detritus of the wives of Hollywood execs who live North of Montana. And feel that they’re okay. For now.
I feel dread and doom, and I hate this part of me that feels what’s coming, and knows it’s time to leave.
What I Knew Before I Left
From the loving God who brought you The Secret and Carnivorism
Comes Santa Monica, the strange story of a liquid golden light pouring through the streets
Illumining it’s odd angels, descending from a sideways heaven. wrapped in discards, green plastic bags, clever boots
Made from water bottles (only the good kind, smart water and the like), a pastiche of civilized things,
Draped, cloth like, on the heads of disparate floating bands of people
Judaic nomads
Streaming across Biblical sands,
Slowly, with a plodding grace that makes them almost levitate.
Pushing carts or pullling them, or a busted, held by stockings suitcase
Are those my stockings- I glance out from the Goodwill greedily appraising the two dollar dress
It would last me, someone bought it from The Gap and gave it away
I slip so easily into a long, earthy looking sundress from some hopeful actress or mom who has a nice low house with a tastefully tricked out lawn, a house so small it can only fit the air of
Of clean white privilege
in Apartment therapy or reno'd houses in Venice Beach.
These yuppies can turn an infested crack house, l
anguishing in the relentless Western Sun
into someone’s miniscule dream mansion.
My dream mansion.
Grocery Shopping
I walk out of the Wild Oat, a grocery store which, even upon speaking it, stimulates my taste buds to replicate the rustic, natural savour of a bygone era or of people on a renovated deck somewhere who can afford a personal chef.
The thing you love about movies most is the light, and second the pretty toned people breaking up in that lovely light, making every moment, cinematic and real, you can touch it
Live in it, eat it, saturated colors in Southern or even Northern California, a deep stained glass window red dyed on a shirt bouncing on wooden floors so modern and honeyed brown you can smell the clean, organic sawdust and it makes you cry with joy
And everything - it’s important because it happened in that light, even the man who stood in front of me, attempting to undo his pants way down on Wilshire and fifth while I grabbed my friend’s hand and ran across the street, pulling us away from his public self loving filth, his shifty protest to a world that won’t remember or honor his tortured sex, his middle eastern face, his descent from the first civilizations, sand houses made in Ur.
Come on Michelle, What? Just come on.
A moment to be remembered because of that light
Living in the moment light, I am actually living
The light
And the empty streets and everywhere the ghosts of the privileged
The Beach
the drudge filled beach.
Upon which I frolic with my friend, and her boy, sun streaked soul twin to my own,
bikinis children and hair, l
ike a dream a moment, a moment of which you can say I am living. In it.
When we leave the water a thick black grime is attached to our feet. I
t’s a hard shell not my imagination. It must be scraped off and my Vegan friend shrugs it off
Her insides preserved, from foods so pure they are like embalming fluid
Impervious to decay.
These are the little things that invade my hyperactive gut
Those streaming nomadic angels, the calico stuffies studding the ungraspable view
The stunned ocean vista,
The rigid tight blondes whose erect and etched in faces, hardened from the sun, whose forward march in gymshoes on the sidewalk negates my brown existence
Their walk evicting me from a paradise in which they feel I don’t belong
These are the things that add to my baffling body chemistry
That stir a lament in my womb
Which rises up through me and out of my mouth to these unfortunate words to my husband
I hate LA
We must leave.
I hate this place
Even though my days are filled with the life of the gentired poor.
Free mommy and me’s and swim classes, a renovated, glassy library rand the sale bin at old navy, and roller blading
On the boardwalk pushing our stroller along
And free concerts at the farmer’s market, although it’s a five dollar apple is the magic fruit that reminds me that doom await’s - the gap between the have nots and the have,
I see the angels everywhere, God’s marauding band of rag tag misfits, pouring not from the sky, but from a slit in the side part of the unearthly So Cal horizon
The creeping post apocalyptic feeling, like a scene from Mad Max, except there is no
Liberating anglo saxon hero with powerful, imposing hair.
Only Mexicans and white people so dismantled by life their race has become another, grayed blending into the steel aluminum of old trash cans and frayed clothes, black men with hair that swrirls in unpicked tufts, some Willie Wonka wonderland that makes me toy with the idea of a story for my son- someone being whisked way to the magical kingdom on a black man’s head.
I tell my husband, do you see these people? More and more everyday. And how are we different?
Fingering the wealty cast offs at the second hand store,
picking through the free possibilities,
a party he covers or the premier of some ghastly Hollywood film, another friend stuffing whole meals in her bag at the matinee movies, so she doesn’t have to buy the museum
piece popcorn, under glass and lit like a diamond necklace in a French Jewelry store.
Sunny rent controlled apartments, covered in mold.
Everything is fine he says
But the hairs on my arm are sensate to only but what I feel
I figure out how to take a senior citizen acting class for free and
Get toys from my son’s cousins and the man at the seven eleven gives me flowers no charge as he does to all the ladies who wear dresses when they buy their trashy mags.
We are learning to live like foragers in a sunny tropical land
Maybe we should have stayed, and become the first third world in habiters in the First World
Melting in the liquid California Sun, into some sub Saharan or sub equatorial land in which the first colonialists laughed at their nakedness and marvelled at their Eden.
Pick fruit from the trees, aluminum from the streets, half eaten, whole grain sprouted bagels from the bin behind the Whole Food.
Those streaming angels, humbled, Aztec descendants reclaiming, in a mindless slow afternoon troll, their lost and conquered land.
I feel dread when I see them contrasted with
The reworked and leather porcelain skin
of the people who don’t even need rent control,
and the Fringe White,
who can’t afford botox and anything better than Pantene
and are no longer eligible for rent control, who wrap themselves in the detritus of the wives of Hollywood execs who live North of Montana. And feel that they’re okay. For now.
I feel dread and doom, and I hate this part of me that feels what’s coming, and knows it’s time to leave.