California // Matter // Conspiracy
in east LA i saw a shirtless man kneel down right there on the sidewalk to pray to Allah with no prayer rug, just his half bare body, the cement and the hot sun, and his love for a god i’m not sure is really there is what helped me know which way i was traveling in a place i’ve been before but will never not be new // i’ve eaten fruit here that has brought tears to my eyes // whatever sorry stone you are eating outside of this place, it is not fruit and if god exists, she’s in the flesh of the tangerines i bought at the stand that time, or in the palm of the woman who sold them to me, or in the sweat-soaked bandana of the farmworker who grew them // where ever she is, she is not in any machine or any bank and // most likely she is this conspiracy of soil, sun and citrus // how the sun here illuminates the best of me, is better drugs than i could buy anywhere // here there are so many pretty houses and // there are more white homeless than i have seen in any city // someone’s front yard is an orange grove blooming across the street from where i watch a young man’s young cheek held to pavement by LAPD, and yes he is black because that’s how that story goes and it does not matter what he has done it does not matter what he has done let me tell you it does not matter // here the movie stars look like regular people because that’s what they are and sometimes when they are out doing life like the rest of us, they even look sad and i think about the time we traveled up the coast and then inland to the redwood forest and by the time we got to the top of the mountain, all the chatty fanny-packs had left to find a place for dinner, so there we were alone, cloaked in a silence, all around us, these giants, these older than Jesus, these shallow root structure and still standing and this is the only church to which i will ever willingly return // and if not, there is always Salinas which, to the people of Salinas, is just some hick town, but the hills and the sky are just the way some old book stamped them in my mind, and I hear Janis’s rasp in its dry wind and // how a thing lives in us, how i breathe in a prayer of dust and sugar and sun must matter // how a body bends and breathes and what it comes to love in the small space it finds on the ledge of this hot volatility, whether earth or broken pavement, must point the way for all of us and // this must be the place
