T-28

This June 3, Allen Ginsberg would have been 115 years old. In honor of him: City of baking asphalt, of madness blowing down from mountains named for martyrs, of 13 million people strangling on the failure of their dreams, or the realization of their dreams, or the fatal realization that they were dreaming someone else’s dreams all along, and now it’s too late. City of fiber optic and chrome, where avatars of movie stars give you directions to hotels staffed by custom coded daemons. City of the ghosts of orange groves, of vigilante flash mobs and outpatient skulljacks. Eighty percent Hispanic city, with fifty percent cops who can’t speak Spanish. City of forgotten spaces. City of sawed-off shotguns under cash registers, dream factory at land’s end, city of walking in celluloid footsteps. City of pitiless sunlight and exalted dawns. City of the long slog toward the permanent kinetic paradise of adoration and burgeoning traffic. God of thunder, you are absent here except below the surface of the earth, and we like you that way. We cherish adore and worship the fear that arrives with every temblor that isn’t the Big One but might be when we first feel the ground jump and shimmy under our feet. Secretly we all want to crack off and fall into the sea.