Christmas Day in Los Angelesis a poem from my second book Good News for the Bad News Blues. I’ve spent many a Christmas in L.A. and it’s an interesting place each day of the year, good or bad, but Christmas in particular always felt quite unique to any other place I ever spent Christmas. There’s still Christmas trees and eggnog and all that jazz, the city is still decorated and lights hang on the streets and just a warning if you’ve never seen it before, if you put Christmas lights on a palm tree, the palm trees will look like dicks. Anyway, I figured I’d share the following poem, I wrote it not thinking about dick shaped palm tress but thinking about that different feeling. The feeling that only comes around once a year when it’s Christmas Day in Los Angeles. 

CHRISTMAS DAY IN LOS ANGELES

It’s Christmas Day in Los Angeles

The streets are clearer than you’d ever see

It seems like everybody

Has traveled home

Everyone just visits this city y’know

Most

Only last a year or two

Before a life of dreaming falls through

Back up north

Back to the south

Across to the midwest

It doesn’t matter where

Every Christmas

There’s a mass exodus

And the city’s left bare

With false snow

Decorated palm trees

Chinese food and Kentucky whiskey

It’s Christmas Day in Los Angeles

I worked the bar Christmas Eve

Not many customers

But tips they would love to leave

As a little Christmas bonus for me

I suppose we paid for each others’ company

Christmas Day in LA

People go to the movies

Maybe a diner

Meet up with their rag-tag friends

The ones with either no place to go

Or not enough money to travel home

It’s Christmas Day in Los Angeles

Raise a glass of whatever you can find

Let’s drink till the spirits ease our mind

Sure the sky is blue

And it might not be as cold as we’re used to

But we do what we do

When it’s Christmas Day in Los Angeles