Great Poem + Cities

Hey Elizabeth, I really liked your poem! A very evocative portrait of city life and a nice use of words to contrast the natural world with the man made. I gather that you live in the city, rather than the suburbs? In Los Angeles, it's different because our Downtown is only about 2 by 3 miles, and not that many people live there, and we don't have near as many skyscrapers as Chicago or New York because of earthquake restrictions and the general topography. Here, everybody lives in the suburbs, or even close to L.A. in Hollywood and the areas surrounding Downtown, but almost all of the towns throughout all of the suburbs are part of the city of Los Angeles. So I live in Northridge, but Northridge is not a city, just a town, and a town that is part of L.A., even though it is 27 miles from Downtown.

I suppose Chicago has a similar sprawl, a city center with surrounding towns spread out for miles. Concrete everywhere, as you say, and the same is true here, though we in the Valley are lucky to be near the mountains. For us, the deal is cars. Cars are like rivers here. The riverbeds are the streets and the cars are the water, ever flowing in every possible direction at all times, never stopping. Except at the doggone red lights, lol.

But yeah : Big Cities with too many people jammed into 'em. Developers paving over everything.

Still, you can find the good spots. That's what I stick to, my good places. I enjoy the city when I go down for a concert, or take the train for an occasional walkaround, but I am glad I'm a Valley Boy.

And one day I might wind up in the desert. I mean, I probably won't, but then again.....

One thing that I could do in the desert would be to see the stars every night, as you mentioned. I have only seen a full sky of stars perhaps ten nights of my life. The last time would have been in 1994 during the three day power outage after the quake. Here in the Valley, we do see the brightest stars and planets every night, and we have a low skyline, so we can see things like Venus and the Red Star or Planet that I wrote about a few nights ago. But it would be nice to see more.

The only bummer about the desert would be that it is 100 to 150 miles away from everything.

Well anyway, that was a great poem, though I don't know if you meant it in a positive/negative way or just in a detached observational way.

And don't tell me, for that is the magic of poetry.

But write more!  :)

I liked your posts today, and I am glad that you went to see the Ryuichi Sakamoto documentary tonight. I remember him from way back in the 80s, when he composed the score for a movie called "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", a war story about POWs in Japan that starred David Bowie, at the time when he was taking a sojourn into acting. Sakamoto was in it too, as an actor, and if I remember correctly he won an Oscar for his soundtrack. I hope you enjoyed the documentary, and I very much enjoyed your posts today (though I am glad you were not affected by the fire across the street. Maybe Mrs. O'Leary's Cow was acting up again....yeah, bad joke I know).  :)

My day was per usual, though I did have a nice evening walk at Aliso Canyon. It was Bunny City in there at 7:30pm. They were hopping every which way and then some. I didn't watch a movie tonight, but I did watch an episode of "Kolchak : The Night Stalker", which was filmed in Chicago, so I get a small glimpse of the city that way.

Keep posting and writing. You are very creative and have a lot of insight.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)