EXPO LINE SPLEEN

At this hour from the Culver City platform
of the light blue Expo line, the Exposition Rider,

the Hollywood Hills are effulgent silhouettes (those bitches!)
the crest of the monster hill at Hahn park: slurry
and fuzzy. You can barely make out the wide stairs

hikers use to resist the stubble of the grade in the
challenging landscape. You can make out the lookout house,
the bare-pane, pomo, a-frame visitor center cum hut.

Then, past the humpback canvases of the ginormous fabricas
production houses, factories, keg distributors, sound lots,
auto body rebel bases, bivouacs and trucking school laboratories.

Past squat orange tire churches and overwatered municipal trees,
city-block long Jetro's Cash and Carry Restaurant Depot, that bazaar
of surly wholesale restaurant associates, past gangs of power lines
and telephone switch centers, past cupcake nuclear homes painted
peach and chained to palm trees with blown-back hair fronds.

Still farther as we come up on La Cienaga, her enormous storage
citadels and parking lots and overhangs and undermergings.
We come up on La Cienaga as she unleashes her metallic overbite,
her undertow of Monoxidemobiles.

Immediately, in the background, the rank and file of Westwood
skyscrapers and the Sandstone Rome of U.C.L.A. and beyond that more
mountains, ranges and if you look through the trees of the houses
you can barely make out a ridiculously tiny Hollywood Sign.

Past the Farmdale stop, past the Freshman Academies, Academic Houses
of Dorsey High, and on to the dilapidated alleyways trash-riddled,
windswept streets that slowly go from industrial to residential,
warehouses to individual homes and residences, personal homesteads.

past Crenshaw, the County Probation Depot, there on the corner,
West Angeles Cathedral, its stained-glass knave, crescent auditorium,
humungous semicircle self and then Jefferson gets very two-lane-ish
and stretches for two miles or so before it hits Vermont.

On Vermont it creeps across the Museum of Natural History, the County
Rose Gardens, and the Institute of California or something or other.
Next up the private bricks de la Universidad de Califas del Sur!

And for a good ten minutes

COUNTY KITE

Diamonds of papers
cut from the tusk
of an urgent surge
for words, hand-shaked
into confidential loam
of another pound of teeth
transported to all facilities
under the purview of an M-14.
This one urges war. This one
is a minute reckless message.
This one unlocks a mutiny
on an undermanned shift.
This one pencils silence
more heavy than whetstone.

All the County Kites fight
gag order design of Jail.

All the County Kites finger
the air with bastard cursive.