For today, I was to write a poem that imposes a particular song on a place along the lines of a soundtrack laid on top of the location. The poem should describe the interaction between the place (Las Angeles) and the music (“Hotel California” by the Eagles) using references to a plant (avocado tree). I also should incorporate a quotation. Extra credit if I used some every day, overheard language.

72 Suburbs in Search of a City

Hotels it’s got, but New York, it’s not.
Any time of the year, right here
on the way to El Aye with
arpeggio wind twisting your hair with
music meaning heaven or hell.

We hear harmonizing guitars
introducing savored troubadour’s forbiddingness
when she lit a candle and showed us the way,
because nobody was from the beaches in Cee Aee
where voices wake you up in the middle of the night.

Where innocence ends with Tinseltown experience
and songs sung in sad cafés,
they play
the finest guitar semi-solos ever made
and we mirror allegories
of high life’s metaphysical characters,
but you must be there or bring your own alibis.

South of the Sierra Madre, along the coastal
micro climes they fly like Hass Autano, Reed Pinkerton,
Gwen Fuerte, and Lamb Bacon sing and play after Linda.
Fine for nut wrapped avocado testicles,
we cut the skin and suck the flesh before it rots.

Will we ever leave and not go back again?
To face the music and the steely knives killing the beast.
We are all just prisoners in our own tree of device
where we can jump out any time we like,
but we can never leave without a guitar coda.

Look both ways at night on dark desert highways.
Mind the gaps when the fake is real,
and the music makes the passage to the place you were before.