An Oranged Grove Fireplace

Huge concrete rivers containing slime green streams,
old freeways built for cars at 45 miles per hour.
Even the eucalyptus trees are transplants:
shedding their bark,
littering the ground,
turning into dirt.
My eyes, cataract hazed, smog just got in the way.
LA invented smog, refined it,
turned it into art, a lifestyle,
A sense so strong,
the taste of licked chain link.

Help me picture the bricked house,
frozen framed with fancy scalloped edges,
faces barely known, now missing from my mind,
their remains returned to a final childhood.
I hate rap -- my father hated Hendrix.
Why did they come here, to the West Coast Mecca of New?
Until so much,
turned so many sweet orange blossoms into pungent,
dusty, parts of smog.

You could drive to a wooded foothill,
leave the city just behind,
where graffiti, and time, had not yet reached,
pour oil down the road to keep down the dust
that climbed away from a clear, cool creek to an old cabin
built around an older scrub oak.
No environmental police to bust you.

Modern steel and marble are there now,
oiled roads have long been paved over,
pieces of the puzzle permanently lost.
Eighty-eight year old oak now burns behind thickened glass,
no orangewood left to pass over the polished, metal hearth.

Where is the fuzz -- when you really need them?

Paris R Masek II