Back in the city of angels but with a little more madness in my skin,
a little more beat to the rhythm pumping through my veins,
a glitter-bombed, Tibetan peach pie-eyed mermaid.
Wish I could bottle up the way the sunshine pierced the redwood treetops,
preserve the feeling of rose rewards, of roadside raspberries devoured crab-watching on unnamed coastal cliffs,
savor the succulent visions of the hysterical in Tenderloin, the rambling hippies praising the universe,
whose bodies operate grungy against the pastel paradise of painted ladies, asymmetrical,
whose ravaged hands hammer out drum-circle psychedelia while strangers spin in sacred spirals,
inspired by Haight Street temples, enshrined in endless crystals,
rhapsodizing god in all names and forms.
Abducted by an unceasing out-of-body experience, my spirit is still
choking down fernet between beetle-adorned bar walls,
stumbling, intoxicated by exultation, up and down tie-dyed hills,
singing infinite gratitude to our angel-headed hipsters.
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JESSICA BAKER is a museum publishing professional with editorial experience at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Rubin Museum of Art. She occasionally plays with words, but more frequently guides others with theirs. She can be found scrawling the poetry of Sylvia Plath on Los Angeles walls in ultraviolet invisible ink.