"Come real or don't come at all." -- The World Stage mantra

Oh, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA. Home. Los Angeles will never leave me. Its relentless calling will always take me back into its winding arms.

I have to say I had a definite emotional response reading Voice from Leimert Park. Coleman and Tabu's words just hit (not to sound cliché or lame or anything like that) home. The poem I'm going to map tonight (and I hope I do it right) is "Dedication" by Tabu. The first line was a visual homerun for me. I saw it instantly.

"This is not for the thugs.

This is for the tired security guards catching the bus home, southbound on Vermont."

Southbound on Vermont. You don't know how many times I sped down that narrow ass street, heading to the 101 for Hollywood, heading to the small church building where FilAm Arts had their weekly meetings for FPAC, heading to the bomb ass Korean tofu house next to Wilshire, heading to this or that and being pulled over when I had a bunch of USC kids in my car and the cop didn't like our brown-skinned faces. After the cop looked at all our USC IDs (I guess he didn't believe we were students), he let us go and I didn't get a ticket for doing nothing but being colored.

Southbound on Vermont. I love that street. I love the green, gray, and yellow apartment building on the corner of Wilshire and the people walking about to get home and the cars, cars, cars, all hustling and honking just to get home. So much imagery jammed-packed in three words: "southbound on Vermont."

I lived off-campus at USC, so I was just a few blocks away from Leimert Park. But let's get back to the poetry.

What I love about Tabu and Coleman was the Los Angeles affection I felt through the language. Tabu did it in a sexual, Stevie Wonder lovemaking kind of way. Coleman's "For Women Who Cruise the Night" spoke directly to me--because she was talking about me and literally to me. When you grow up in LA, and you're lucky enough to have a car, your car becomes the repository for every experience, every growing pain, everything. "alone you speed where nothing exits." I can't tell you how many times I cried in my car, how many times when family got rough, I'd just drive away to nowhere on the freeway until I was at the end of the line in ghetto San Pedro or Old Town Pasadena. Opposite ends of the world but with the same effects. In LA, my roommates and I also used to compare freeways and would ask each other: which one is your favorite? Mine was the 110. Jervey Tervalon (my first creative writing professor at USC) was the next poet after Tabu, and I just collapsed at his line: "the 101 runs through my life."

I think what I loved about these poets were their use of succinct and distinct imagery. Tabu's lines were rife with epithets of incredible, normal people: "This is for liquor store managers with southern accents / sixteen-year-olds with comic books tucked in back packs, / freelance reporters in denim button shirts and / the suited publicists who appreciate them more than either can say."

It was a call to Los Angeles, a place that gets too much bad rep for not being literary enough or not being a 'real city' enough or what-have-you. But Los Angeles is real, it's home, and its pockets of geographically segregated neighborhoods create a diversity of enclaves that produce great works like these poets. You either hate it or love it. But like the constant traffic, southbound or northbound on Vermont, it will always be there, growing and never changing. My time back in LA last week for my grandmother's funeral reminded why I left it, and why I know I'll come back one day.

"Asked me if I could replenish her faith in brothers,
but found war and hope chests were bare.
Boulevards of broken dreams
lie behind facade of my button-downed battlements.

All I have to offer
is a relentless embrace of right now,
terrified resolve to walk towards fear
because I'm bigger than apprehension...

.. even if I don't know it yet."

Boulevard of broken dreams. How many times have I blasted that song in my car is endless. Have I ever asked this class yet whether they can 'write' back home? For me, I can't. I can't write a word about LA until I leave it. And I know it's because LA, for me, holds that "fear" Tabu is talking about.