An Open Letter
                    to the Women of Los Angeles—

                    1.

Flee my fate with me.
A secret crime makes for
poor company, lingers from before
I was rich, haunts every
footstep, indebts all progress, touches
whatever each fingertip does, follows

                    2.

what inches these swallowers of
shadows fall over, hungers for
the sweetness of its honeyed
whispers dripped into ears my
voice kisses, echoes what invisible
punishment sensitives witness. That said,

                    3.

my heart’s an open letter
to the women of Los
Angeles, and only you can
read it the way it
wants to speak, to be
repeated by those lips things

                    4.

only they can articulate. What
it wants to say: my
cure for Narcissism, how your
beauty fascinates me more than
my own! Take, for instance,
those days we spent together

                    5.

we encountered knowing we weren’t
alone. That, though each seems
the same, the weather in
LA remains constant that time
might not change or chase
away those painted faces of

                    6.

theirs they pay for that
others pay them respect as
idols claim devotion, expect reverence
delivered as if prayers came
in with residual cheques. Regular,
constant. Interminable, perpetual earnings reflecting

                    7.

one moment an image was
glimpsed and exploited ever since.
Impermanence transgressed by this quest
for something immortal. Something beyond
substance, too shallow to be
found beneath surface, yet its

                    8.

presence transcends. Uplifts, even, as
counterintuitive that is in this
lonely initiation on the path
of ashes which have yet
to cool after one’s past
has been extinguished. So well

                    9.

do I know this that,
without telling them, people I
meet know it, they notice
the change that came before
I did into their lives,
bonded as we have since,

                    10.

over the loosening of our
tongues from silencing others’ lies
on which, for too long,
we choked thinking we needed
them to survive, but we
are the spirits freed by

                    11.

torches pressed to birth certificates,
released from those whose touches
we want to forget. Our
chosen identities tokens of liberty
worn where chains would have
been. Our staged names incantations

                    12.

performing magic worked when carried
from one place to the
next on strangers’ breath, between
this life and the next.
Together, my tender lovers, never
will we taste of death!