It is not the dour deranged delirious honking outside your window

It is the ringing silence of chirping corn fields 

It is statues of monstrous vomit green artichokes

You Are Entering: California’s Artichoke Capital of the World!

It is not the crowded Thai restaurants 

Howling like orangutan exhibits

It is the sticky tarts in the glass display 

Being kissed by flies

It is not sweaty clubs and cocaine white bathroom sinks and galloping home to Nowheresville

Under scalding rain and earl gray skies

Darker even than the glass cigarette trees 

It is windows of rolling yellow lemon tree hills 

Carved from mod white Emergency Room walls 

And the dopey face of the nurse named Meadow

It is not the anesthetic obsidian sound of the subway 

Because there is no room between angry glass trees and Reaper black mother Earth 

For you to drive a car

Your tires would pop from the leaf shards 

They fall all year round

It is miles of vans parked outside a Rococo smoothie store

A limp eighties Toyota next to a public garden 

Bees abuzz in the frosty sunflower sun because 

What nice lady planted those pretty flowers?

Eboracum Novum glistens in the reflection of your melting drink 

Warm and caring as a mirror

It is the polyester flower flinging from the bus window on 14th street

It is the model in satin and lace and chiffon

It is the frostbitten window you will rest your cheek on

And dream of better days