This City Will Be The End Of The World
Excerpt from Rural Heart In Urban Body
Los Angeles is a city of heat and tar. This is where all the hell will set loose eventually, I am sure of, everything said and done. Not a morbid view, just that it has all the signs and symptoms of the brass core that fosters all lava elements required to eventually explode a saturated present into the ultimate dawn of the dystopian future. Exactly how they show Los Angeles in the movies of future. All the fake artists and fake poets of this city, along with the woke living on the coastline will eventually bring this world down as they try to save the world with their yet another scheme. That’s the long and the short of it.
Now it still remains impregnated with the nostalgia of old classics of Hollywood and the art and magic of films. If you filter out the shallow glamour, which I will get to later, it has nights of jazz in poor film studios, in I phone camera of the teen cinematographer, in part-time script writer writing away her plot of a priest in an foreign planet, and the breeze of palm trees under a full moon…these many nights of jazz in an ever-corrupted city, with the never-dying delicious taste of noir, this only city in the entire world which could truly hold noir. I have met the only artists here.
Then the glamour. That remains very personal. From the very first time I stepped into this city, I was immediately taken by its liquor and sand, and all the nights that followed in youth and intoxication, all those Gatsby summers in all the rich places of this city, making me their very own in a heartbeat, as I scattered my unpolished poems, not in the clean blue sea, but in alleys and balconies abandoned by myself for myself. Such a high. This city. Such a high. And you wake up one day having lost the sea.
But it is too early to be talking about the loss of sea. So instead I will tell you how I dream endlessly in getting breaks from a city that chains me with its half-lit parties and people of films, its once known beauty of the mountain and the sea, its hippies I never found, and one rock who keeps me afloat. And its sand that keeps filling all my corners.
So I take breaks and go to the forest, here and there. I try to camp or get a cabin in the woods. Then I stand with the mornings facing the view where once there was a river flowing. This morning there is fog slipping down from that snow filled peak barely taking any ownership. Little particles of hard snow fall on my naked feet, my hair wet enough to make me sick the next day, my coffee spilled from a cup I am ashamed of, and the magical mist as if designed by the green witch herself slowly covering my place of wild, and only one blue cardinal singing my entire life away.
V Paliwal
