Thursday, June 27, 2024: Cindy Weinstein's "Babylon by the Sea"

 I didn’t like her when we first met.

loud, sprawling, changeable,

dry breath, wild hair,

perfume sweet

and acrid

rags one day, dior the next

whole weeks languishing in kmart acrylic

sunday mornings organic cotton

vegan shoes

her geography melodramatic, terrifying, biblical

her landscape exposed obscene

I ran to the arms of an old lover

grown attractive with my nostalgia and fear

but his breath was too moist and smelled of rot

his arms constricting

claustrophobic

so i came back to her.

Riding her river of streets and freeways i finally got it.

It is her…

this city, this place

these hills and deserts and valleys and expanses of concrete and asphalt.

There is no need of other, no other place, no other lover.

Her arms always open. She takes me in, takes me back,

lets me go and welcomes me home.

She feeds me when I’m hungry, finds me work when I am struggling, gives me shelter

when the rains come… and when I am riding high again she spreads out her unending

feast.

Craving silence, she wraps me in her dark green places.

Looking for adventure, she sparkles her lights and turns the music up loud.

I fly in and out of her skyways and marvel at her twinkling stars. I crest her hills and

gaze breathless into her jeweled depths.

She is decked in every color of precious gem, perfumed in all rare scents.

She is voluptuous beauty – hills rolling to beaches that kiss the ocean; valleys

surrounded by dark clefts of mountains.

She can be explored forever.

She takes all who come - pilgrims, paupers, pimps, seekers and salesmen, the lost and

the found.

She offers the dream, all dreams living in her prismatic eyes.

She is the gateway to the snow covered crags and the vast deserts.

She lies languid along the beaches where the waters reach out to foreign lands.

She speaks all languages. All colors fill her streets.

I write her songs and poems and paint her rarest hues.

Expanding… I expand into her, inhale her into me.

She’s the City of Angels - Babylon reborn by the western sea.

© 2015 Cindy Weinstein 

Cindy was born and raised in upstate NY. After college, she moved to Washington DC, where she established her career, her art, and her family. She came to Los Angeles in 1993 with her two young children, and stayed until she immigrated to the desert of Joshua Tree in 2017. She has been writing, reading, and performing her poetry off and on since she was 17. She’s been published in a number of Los Angeles anthologies including poeticdiversity as well as in Cholla Needles. She also has a self-published chapbook entitled Lampshades From The Skin of Roses. Today she hosts the desert version of the Feral Fusion Open Mic monthly at the Beatnik Lounge in downtown Joshua Tree.