I Love LA in a Song

I love LA in a song -

Purple, yellow, sandy and near-forgotten;
Like the ghost of neon from the mind
Of some screenwriter
Who arrived too late
To call the city's melancholy
Their own.

Stretched out between sunsets
The gentle lap of ocean
The brown haze
The palm silhouettes
Almost ghosts themselves
In a pre-twilight fervor;
These bars poor imitations
Of any New York could offer;
These women melting together
Already forgotten.

It plays all like a 45 record,
Slightly scratchy, the needle
Not quite caught, these indentations
And valleys of sound and memory all driven down
Many times before, but how sweet
They begin
And how sadly sunrise looks in the rear view,
Lighting up this white-washed concrete,
The glittering beauty of the angels' city
Scuffed and beaten in the harsh brown daylight.

Would those angels live here now?
Would the concrete desert of dreamers
Feel lost to them should they visit?
Would anyone notice amidst the carnival
Of boardwalk and bacchanalia?
Or would we send them looking again
For the sparkling beauty of what could be in some other basin of the world, perhaps some other world altogether?

Perhaps that is where the melancholy lives-
Those moments when we know
They have descended
And left already,
The itch of them
Like a stray hair after the barber,
Constantly sought after,
And never quite found.