Category: Urban Poetry

I write to cope with the world,

like how a drinker drinks to life.

I wet my whistle on the fountain pen,

diving deep into the bottle of my mind.

I hide there surrounded by my own darkness,

part of which is gunk picked up from time.

Ever seen spat-out gum on a street?

After a while it becomes a black blotch;

afterwards it’s just part of the scene,

along with homelessness

and people consumed by broken dreams.

Well, that’s all inside of me,

blended with the misspellings

and grammatical issues of my birth;

I can’t handle it all without spilling

my drink along the page.

There sat a brick on the corner

of Chelten and Green.

It was red, dusty and stained

with anger.

Anger because someone had thrown it

through the window of a church.

Angry because shattered shards

took everyone’s reflection with them.

It wasn’t the first time, you see,

that rage and brick met head to head.

It wasn’t the first time

foreheads bled.

Over the years, different hands

attached to different voices

declaring different causes

have picked up the brick for their aims,

and regardless of target, homegrown or foreign,

no one ever asked

the brick how it felt, what it wanted to do.

No, it was simply chosen

by arms far larger than itself,

gripped by steaming red nails

much harder than itself.

Truthfully, the brick had no natural rage.

It wasn’t at all a thing of violence.

What it dreamed of was construction,

the building of things,

from homes for the abandoned,

to bridges between understandings.

The brick truly was

softer than what others thought,

and when the Powers had learned this,

oh, how they scowled—

how they hurled bloody hate.

And for one last time, someone grabbed

and tossed it—this time out

of a window instead of inside one.

There it lied, exactly where it fell,

on the corner of Chelten and Green,

abandoned by those that once had need

of its innocence and generosity—

abandon by all

except wind and rain,

except time, except pain—except

the funny thing was

this rain and this time

became its greatest friends

because pain over time, fades with cool rain,

and through weather

the bitter got better,

the hot red dust clearing away.

Yes, that’s right, the violence and causes,

and even the people,

melted away.

The brick was no more,

and no more a brick,

what remains

today on the corner of Chelten and Green

is a flower as sapphire as day.

I’m a salmon in a sewer.
No sooner than my dad popped one—
then bounced on
my mother,
destiny had mapped out my train route.

Born from sand
that bore the bloody hand
of history,
I was caught on a hook and reeled into the conspiracy
of the United States,
the land of the streets, the broken homes,
and Mickey D’s fish-filets.

I watched a lot of television back in the day,
filling my head with commercials of things
I still don’t have to this day.

That’s not the crazy thing though;
what blows a hole through my dome
is that, somehow, I was convinced
that not having these things was akin
to tragedies one hears about in Greek hymns,

that not having the burgers AND fries,
was the same as Oedipus losing his eyes,
but I suppose that’s what it means to be blind,
to swim in the muck and forget that one’s rivers were prime.

Were they though?
His-story, White-America’s story,
has butchered
MY story
so much that I’m reading these textbooks backwards,
and some of the pages are in tatters—
there’s old gum and scribbled out matters,
but that’s the inner-city public school system for you.

My hood did the best it could,
housing all manner of lost fish in a dirty pool
with water “naturally flavored” by corporations
that cared enough to feed us all those juicy fats and metals.
Look at our hearts! They’re are all big with lard—huh?
McDonalds, that you again?

Damn. I’m getting off track—wait, where is the track?
How the hell did I get here?
That’s the billion dollar question.
They say follow the money,
but I lose all trace of it in the river of blood.

One man sold another.
One brother lost a brother.
One mother was torn from under,
and now we have
millions of fishes in sewer water.

Who do we blame
for parting the sea and pissing in it?
African kings?
European imperialists?
Or maybe those Indigenous chieftains?

Is it just a sickness in man?
Are we born from a sea of stars
only to rot on a wasteland?

Seems like being human was not enough,
so we created a nuclear bang
to reach into our very atoms
and rearrange them.

Now the trees are burning.
Now the air is black.
Now the waters are tainted.
Now I am a salmon

in a sewer.

Buses rumble and bodies move through the busy course-way of life.

The air is somewhat thick, like ice stuck on the corners of fences and faces.

Sullen and weary, the pale sun of the heart still burns, still moves along its arc,

Were hope gravity, the stars would turn and shine their light eternally,

but the night sky is full of long faded memories,

and the eyes spend their tears chasing a glimmer.

Nevertheless, buses of roaming bodies pulse through arteries of cities.

Monuments are built and clothes are woven, sold, and worn.

Plates are molded and food is sourced.

Families eat their fill, though some perpetually chew the rough skin of their sufferings.

The earth with its nervous bowels shakes, its continents drift,

and the dust that powders its face clutters and pulls away.

Everything is war and peace.

Everything is pen and ink.

Everything unsaid has been said

in the bold rumbling and humming

of buses and bodies.