THE GREAT WALL OF LA

The Great Wall of LA

A fallen civilization is this.

Our Troy, our Machu Picchu, our Middle-earth.

Lost in the undergrowth of indifference,

Dense as the ceiba groves and jungle creepers

That engorged the Mayan city-states.

This epic mural,

Most graphic novel,

Spanning half a mile, and 50,000 years of mythic memory.

Yet hidden as the Mona Lisa was once spirited away

Under a handyman’s smock.

Sure, it’s there in perfect repair and plain sight

Still incognito.

Only once dog-walking the wall

I ran into a crowd of people,

Looking downward at Pokémon GO.

This nowhere stretch of North Hollywood

Is as good a place as any to hole up.

Should the new inquisitioners get one look at, say,

Junipero Serra portrayed as half braying jackass,

Or the heresy of Tomás Alva Edison

With Aztec corn-goddess whispering

Watershed inventions in his ear,

They’d come shrieking like the Christian zealots of old.

Hacking off heads and arms and penises

Of works that even so mulitated,

Are immortal.

Then – genocide here, concentration camp there,

A few dozen mass atrocities?

We have enough trouble keeping up with our own.

Dehumanizing roundups and expulsions?

Hold our beer.

Here is history in deepest hibernation.

But I am here to say that twice

I’ve seen it shudder back to life.

The first time during the pandemic

When even the traffic died to a background whisper,

The mural stirred, and murmured.

Acrobatic perspectives unlimbering,

Muscular colors glowing from within.

I saw the lips of the oppressed moving,

I heard them distantly wailing, imploring.

And then one warm election fall

I saw the muscles tense in the torchbearer at mural’s end,

An uncanny polyracial avatar of the candidate

Sprinting into an undimmed future.

Until she was damned by the original sinners

That the Great Wall so amply decries.

Oh Kamala. Oh, that euphoric, fugitive hope.

Now with hallucinatory clarity

I see the wall unscrolling far into the future.

I see Tweedledum and Tweedledee

For the twin tyrants of the hour.

The technagogue Sieg-heiling his Führers,

Ketamine and psilocybin.

I see Ghandis and Kings not yet born

Flexing yet-unplumbed powers of nonviolence.

I see Greenland turning into Sahara

And back again.

I see the coming plague years

And lost decades and generations

As surely as I see the code-breakers of cancer,

Autism, and most virulent racism.

I see the apocalyptic battlefield of all earth and sky

Where robots at last take on their makers,

As I see the most horrific, Pyrrhic

Hollywood ending.

And yes, I foresee greater Hiroshimas and holocausts

Healed by unknowable invincible forces

As Marley forever echoes in my mind,

“Have no fear for atomic energy

For none of them can stop the time.”

I see great-great grandchildren, yours or mine, looking upon me

Like so many Mona Lisas, with a hush of a smile

Hinting that all that is hard-won,

Then so shamefully squandered,

Can yet be re-found.

Here in this driveover zone of not-Hollywood,

Are so many street Guernicas and Nighthawks.

Machu Picchu before Bingham lucked upon it,

Pre-colonized Tikal and Tenochtitlan.

The Great Wall of LA, plug and play

For the next round of resistance that’s gonna come.

Author’s notes: The Great Wall of Los Angeles is the world’s longest mural. It was painted between 1973 and 1984, when equality of all Angelenos and humankind were nearest articles of faith. Lead artist Judy Baca directed dozens of fellow muralists and hundreds of volunteers, many of whom were at-risk teenagers, to complete this monumental People’s History of California.
There are plans, and grants in play, to extend the mural to a mile.
In 1911, Vincenzo Purrugia hid out in the Louvre overnight, cut the Mona Lisa from its frame and carried it away the next morning under his clothes. It went missing for two years. Sensational coverage of the heist helped elevate a small, fairly well-known painting into the most iconic of its kind.
The current final image of the Great Wall:

The Madonna Inn

I paste on a moustache

You rat out your hair.

Let’s cosplay! Let’s Vogue!

I’m Sonny! You’re Cher!

Pile into the pink Caddie,

Show a little thighplasty skin,

We’re all going to the Madonna Inn.

You merchants of clickbait

You crypto-fluencers,

You armchair zillionaires

Who have all the answers.

You Christo-Kardashians

Clutching pearls at my sin,

You’re all going to the Madonna Inn.

The first time it’s tragic.

The second? A farce.

First the posh wedding

And then the divorce.

You start out in rom-com

And end up in porn,

We’re all going to the Madonna Inn.

Turn on the oceanic highway

Like a open-air Louvre,

With the whales all watching

From their respectful remove.

Bound for surreal Big Sur,

Baroque Hearst Castle,

The Rubenesque sands

Where elephant seals jostle.

Wait! – there’s that candy-colored knockoff

Blushing the mountain,

And now you’re checking into the Madonna Inn.

They’ve got your room

If you’ve got the fetish,

The Daisy Mae Room

If you’re feeling coquettish.

The Harvard Square Room

For your inner bluestocking,

The Cave Man Room

For paleo tiktokking.

Every kind of boudoir,

Plus King Tut’s own pissoir!

Even your pee gets a spin,

On the pink whirligig of the Madonna Inn.

You’re Marie Antoinette,

I’m a ruined baronet.

You’re Rosie the Riveter,

I’m the Grand Inquisitor.

You’re Gaga, I’m Jagger,

We’re Bogie and Bacall,

Or just two more knuckledragger

Insta-Neanderthals.

What’s so big about Sur?

Why the buzz about Hearst?

What’s the great rock of Morro

Have on the pink feast

Of kitsch!

Thanks to absentee God

Life’s all a façade,

Just ask old Potemkin,

Who haunts the twee lounge of the Madonna Inn.

Craig Constantine has been a day laborer, bread baker, furniture mover, factory worker, and TV producer. Now a poet, the hardest, worst-paid, best job he’s had. His poems are drifting like his younger self, now in the UK, now in the US, now in Australia. He lives with in LA with his wife Stacey and son Chris in a haunted house, along with Cody the Border Collie, numerous koi fish, and a family of owls.