The palm trees are more beautiful
For being fake.
Winter harbors banished doses of sunlight
And when the rare rains come, like a distraction,
The earth laps up the downpours,
The residents dance in a wet frenzy.
Though the sunlight is piercing, luminous
Its people prefer the unlettered neon lights
Out of which deception mounts and spirals
To extinction
In the insatiable lightlessness of the sky.
In the ephemeral papers, in the immortal books
When the city burns
They call it God’s judgment,
Reckoning and fulfillment.
But those who live here
Incessantly paying high taxes to the flesh
Know it as belonging—
The construction of monuments of pleasure
From the architecture of ashes and lust.