Part 02: Poems About Los Angeles in Too Busy 4 Heartbreak
Poems about Los Angeles condense the city’s sprawling contradictions into shimmering lines—palm-fringed glamour beside freeways, sunsets that varnish glass towers while the forgotten edges hum with urgent, human stories. They move between neon and dust, capturing the transient intimacy of late-night buses and the old cinema marquees, the scent of citrus and car exhaust, the siren-song of reinvention that pulls people in and never quite lets them be the same.
Angeleno verse often mixes myth and grit, celebrating the cinematic mythos while refusing to soften the city’s inequalities, finding beauty in cracked sidewalks and small kindnesses as much as in skyline silhouettes. These poems are maps of memory and motion, elegies for what is lost to development and manifestos for the selves we try on under the endless, complicated California light.
Sigh. I love LA. I really miss living there. But until I get back there—one day, fingers crossed, amen—I’ll just have to write about it. After all, writing is what I do for a living: in my spare time, while my kids are at preschool, while they’re watching a show, sometimes in my Notes app before I fall asleep. If I can’t live it, I write it.
Poems About Los Angeles in My Book Too Busy 4 Heartbreak
Driving ‘Round
Sometimes, I look for your car
When I’m driving around LA
Stuck in traffic on the 405
Or winding through the Hollywood Hills
Diving deep into vast canyons
Old school R&B playing with the windows up and the air conditioning on
Unless serendipity has my back
I don’t think I’ll find you
Cruising with the top down
The breeze caressing your cheek
Something I’ve thought about doing myself
So I absentmindedly gaze
Wondering if today
you’re looking for me, too
What are your thoughts on this poem? Have you ever felt the same? The opposite? Perhaps you’ve tried to avoid seeing someone and their classic convertible while driving around the city. I know that’s been a possibility for me too.
Two other poems about Los Angeles in Too Busy 4 Heartbreak are Feels Like You and The Myth of Manifestation. Pick up a copy of the book online, worldwide on Amazon.
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