The gates are golden...

Dark.

Dimly lit but still, somehow vibrant.

A fire breathing head, that smolders and cracks while it winds from sea level to such great heights. The air is always on aflame.

A cloud appears on the sidewalk like an apparition. A smell you cannot misconstrue. Yeast pumps into the street where transients and tourists salivate for completely different reasons.

The pungent scent of a salt that can only accommodate an alien food chain that is both on the higher and lower end of our own.
The unreality of its reality transformed a movie set into a landscape to live and love right before my eyes.

"Take my picture", floated on the night mingled and muddled with the scent of medicinal THC.

"Where'd you get that booty?", broke the night abruptly like the disappearance of the beam from a lighthouse stretching across a nothingness that fades into a deeper nothing.

Blues spread over the deep blue.

Cash exchanged for contraband that sustains sister cities across the ever-rotating globe.

High heels walk the crowded streets of history.

You can smell the ashes of Ashbury. You can feel melting in the pot. You can see the hum of a place that runs on the real ideal that anything goes.

If it happens here it most definitely doesn't have to stay.

Costumes moonlight as casual and couture. It is difficult to miss the fanfare.

Gold lame jackets of lizard lounges beckoning for the good old days. Vampire teeth suckling on a cigarette. Beehives and bow ties on boys. On girls.

Boys. Girls. Some both. Some neither.

There is no rhythm here because it is too melodic to just be a bass line but there is sound and a strong beat. Noise with intention, vibrating with purpose.

A multiple personality disorder displays itself like the proud tail of a male peacock. Each one layered in a beautiful arrangement. Still schizophrenic but well meaning and full of heart.

It's not hard to see its appeal. Both sex and judicial.

There is something addicting to the feeling of already fitting in. Just another patch on an infinite patchwork quilt. Between the hours of late night and early morning my sister and I became citizens of a city that showed us it's wonders, it's unsavory and it's unkept secrets.

I felt like I fell in love in the dark.

Perhaps that is the best way to fall.