panorama city

roscoe east of brimfield is thick with apartments, hospitals, and malls.
all day: the whoosh of commuters, the scream of leafblowers, the
hydraulic screech & metallic thud & beep of industrial trucks

pulling in, dumping, backing out. this is los angeles, just past 2019.
(memories of seeing “blade runner” at the americana cinemas in
1982 still traumatize you.)

your reality is more cyberpunk than cyberpunk, high-tech yet
low-brow, where studio units start at $1,700, where most
can’t even afford to live in a building with

street-13 tags on its streetlamps and sidewalks, where the homeless
shantytown residents by the 405 survive by way of
charity and 5G mobile devices.

deep into night: the smooth grind of skateboards – that’s the graffiti kids
hitting up the walls of the abandoned montgomery ward. as well, the
usual firecrackers, gunshots, and that tio cursing loud in spanish.

you remember a line from the first rap record you heard at the
musicland/sam goody in the panorama mall, some time after
you saw “blade runner”: “can’t take the smell / can’t

take the noise / got no money to move out /
i guess i’ve got no choice”. that is your
reality, only now it’s also a covid-19

hot zone. nonetheless, you find a music in all the sounds of
panorama city: like sea waves, a crashing storm warning
your enemies: “we’re from right here:

you may say it’s nothing, but we know home is everything.”

you live, solitary, by the venn center of three gang turfs.
murders are rare, as is pedestrian safety: this is not
a war zone, but it’s still dangerous.

one night, you count the gunshots in your head.
one, two, on and on till you reach 15 (you
wonder if some toy or enemy got hit).

your neighbors look to you for safety – people were
murdered by machete across the street:
your filipino blade arts may be useful.

mexican and salvi-spanish, vietnamese, thai, tagalog:
local business signs blend like paint strokes from
sepulveda to coldwater.

you see all this since you walk everywhere, because, 1,
you can’t afford a car, 2, the insurance/fuel costs, 3,
nowhere to park, and 4, hella carjackers, fuck dat.

you’d been hit up, threatened, stabbed. you never showed fear.
you nearly choked to death on your own vomit, drinking
your loneliness away. you’d smoked enough weed till

your lungs shriveled like dried mangoes.
and yet, amidst it all, you don’t let fear beat
you: you keep on, too stubborn to die, too driven

by god-knows-what to not despair: you would rather
die for your quiet moral victories: by doing that,
you’ll find your place, your sense of peace.

:
:

~A.