They cut down trees to build major cities,
to pave new roads.
What happens to the people?
They cut down trees in our hearts,
pave roads for themselves.
They build cities with their names in lights.
But what happens when they leave?
The cities become abandoned,
the lights begin to flicker.
They've permanently built a city in your heart,
making your blood pump thicker.
People come and go,
but the ones you truly remember,
are those whose lights still flicker,
even after they've been gone forever.

This is a conversation from my head, a place where i am a lot more eloquent.

I say "I've only been to a few cities, in a handful of states, in one country. I am in no way qualified to know where in the world i want to live, where i belong. I do, however, know who i belong with. I belong with you."

You say "How do you know that though? You've only been with a handful of girls, surely you haven't seen a world's worth. How do you know?"

I say "The same way i'll know when i've found my city. I know i won't see the world, but when i find my city... when it's time... i'll know. It may be a city i've known for years, just overlooked, but when i truly find it, see it as it truly is, i'll feel safe, happy, full of life... i'll feel home. Like i do with you."

Sometimes I’d just like to get out of my head and get out of my ribbon ribcage and my roadmap wrists.

And I’d like to break the glass of your eyes into the thousand and six pieces of that pickle jar I broke last week in the middle of the street. Your voice sounds the way an old book feels when I first pick it up out of the cardboard box while the sidewalk scolds me for thinking too much. I bet you taste like New Years.

All my favorite people have too much to hold onto.

The city takes your soul block by block
While you sit on the curb in mismatched socks
Trying to retain your extremely weak but steadfast streak of being unique
Cities aren't 24-hour Christmas
The trick is to remain ambitious
Hands in your lap
No eye contact
Going tap tap tap on your Citizens app
While discreetly doodling a Sharpie spaceship on the subway seat
Hitting the street
With sick beats in your feet
Cuz thoughts of quotas and quarters won't quell a quintessential quest
To push the city to its limits and try your very best
To keep biting your nails behind elevator doors
Cuz no chewed-up hands are exactly like yours
A balancing act
Trying not to get trapped
Or smothered by facts
But undeniably
I love what's inside of me
My heart keeps me alive
But what I love makes me live
The city takes my soul
But I've got soul to give.

When my heart beats black inside my chest, and the days I have are filled with death, and the girls I know won't walk with me, then I have my choice in misery. All the birds have died, and the plains are dry, the skyscrapers aren't lit up at night, and the city's sound sounds like nothing, then I have my choice in suffering. People talk a lot, but they hardly speak, all their voices creak in the summer streets, everybody walks but they're not moving, I try to only observe but then I start screaming.

I ******* hate the way that you look at me, your skin's so ******* clean that it feels *****, your eyes move around but you're not seeing, the way I hurt each day but you say nothing. If I tried to leave you might be happy, so I sit and be and go out at night and cheat. I would break your heart, but it hardly beats. You're my walking dead, my darling zombie.

Each day is second rate, I bore so easily. It's like the day we met ended your pleasantry. I startle all the time, you seem so unaware. I chose you number one, you chose to not even care.

I caressed you once, and undressed you thrice, you abandoned me in the middle of the night. All the time I halved, you had your own account, of every thing we did, it wasn't the right amount. Now I hardly care about the drugs you're on. I'm quoting blasphemy out of every psalm. Even the words I write don't tell half of the truth, about the way I felt chasing after you.

We pass the
walled incline
of Barbour Park

during the day
a foreboding
patch…an open
air market for
the slave merchants
hustling crack and
**** drippin ****
that's been stepped
on so many times
its a wonder the cut
can still chide a high
out of a wrangled soul

the park’s
modest elevation
is an advantageous
lookout for
runners dealing
dimes while
petty ante
gangstas
daydream
gun blazing glories
of their next big job

not long ago
the park was
refurbed with
an industrial
strength plastic
Jungle Jim,
soon after
the park was
condemned
as a no go
zone for kids,
the litter of
hypodermic
needles and
mounds of
lead spiked
soil, deemed
a public health
risk for youth...
quickly
repurposed
as a crib
for ballers…

back in the
day, the shady
pocket park
lifted Paterson’s
citizenry off
the heated
pavements of
a bustling
thoroughfare

a respite from
the pulsing
tensions of urbanity,
a secular sanctuary,
balancing the urgent
industry of commerce
with the propriety of
residential life

compacting a
brief escape
from the clanging
metronome with
a viewing stand
offering elevation...
a heightened
perspective on
life’s parade
marching
up and down
Broadway…

this urban
oasis planted
at the center
of Silk City’s
grandiloquent
boulevard,
occupies
the most
democratic
equidistant
transit point
between opulent
Eastside mansions
of livin large tycoons
at one end….
and the
industrial district of
The Great Falls,
rising at Broadway’s
western terminus,
assiduously
manufacturing
dollars for the darlings
of fortune and
subsistence for
workers yearning to taste
the crumbs of
prosperity that may fall
from the tables of
opportunity

the park once a
pleasant face of
the landlocked
4th Ward filled
with homage to
a nation's greatest
citizens, Hamilton,
Rosa Parks,
Lafayette,
Madison, Fulton,
Montgomery and
Franklin has
denounced the
virtuous pursuit of
their aspirational
yearnings

now playas
feast on
the mead
of sustenance
harvested from
emaciated streets

commerce has taken
up full residency...
the wards cottage industry
cannibalizing
homes, hoods and
homeboys

as the
4th Ward
grows ugly,
the healthy
matrix of
bustling
street life
breaks down
the peeps
weakened
lay prostate
offer veins
to blood *******
predators
roaming
distressed
going south
neighborhoods

wise guy
knuckleheads,
get busy
gaming
the system
short changing
themselves and
hustling game
to get by
in the sweet bye
and buy of life

at night
a back lit
Barbour Park
floods with the
yellow haze of
blinking Fair St.
lamp posts
and the pulsing
halations
crowning the
Baptist's
of St. Luke's

sentient figures
shift between
park benches
flitting among the
black torsos
of skeletal trees
blending into
the faded
complexion
of abandoned
swing sets

I swear I see
Hurricane Carter
shadow boxing
dancing
around a gangling
Elm, jabbing
away, lifting
a sweet uppercut
working combos
of left hooks
and right crosses
hoping to drop an
intractable
presence
banging away
at a body politic
forming the walls
of taunting
inequities

Hurricane stays
busy delivering
body blows
to burst
through the
prison bars
surrounding
Barbour Park

Music selection:
Bob Dylan, Hurricane

Paterson
01/30/13
jbm

A fragment from extended poem Silk City PIT.  
Published today to honor the death of Rubin Hurricane Carter.
May he find the freedom in eternal rest that eluded him during his lifetime.

The car window rolls down
Scraping off the condensation that hugs softly
Onto the gossamer surface as it exudes from existence
Welcoming a life on exhibit
Letting in the worlds expectations
A caustic compound of sleet and breeze
This incomplete paper city glows green with envy
Rotting from the inside with cirrhosis and disease
Binary choices yet palindromic
Twisting towards a misnomer of free will.

A cigarette **** let loose
As it arcs towards infinity
Exhaling a sigh from inside my vice
Laced with addiction
Leaving me like flies from ****
Rain beating off our rusted exterior
Oil stripped paint oozing into the street
The suspension rocks to one side
As I unfurl my jacket
and strike a match off my forearm
I look up at the unknowing residents of this metropolis
Each light representing my social dissonance.

My hands stir nervously underneath my coat
As I begin the entrance to exit
Slowly draping my legs from comfort to the sketches of snow
Pushing myself between steel like I wasn't in agony
An abstract conceptulisation of progress
A smooth turbulence smashes against my scalp
Like a metal rod boring into my uncertainty
I was swimming in the same pool as the ****
That populated these furrowed streets in excess
The dead had all the answers
And the living had too many questions.

Something went off in my head
My brain exploded with colours ranging from grey to ****-stained
Dripping onto my shoes with disgust
There was a hole in every pub from here to god knows
Drinking myself into oblivion and waking into this night terror
Rapid eye movements and the slurred decadence of my life on replay
Minds on fire and burrowed into ****** exaltations
But now it's gone
An image in the trees, now splattered across pavements
I make my home where I dream
Starving my journey of canonical basics.

It was all plastic
As I make my way up the emergency exit
Abounding up the stairs with wandering steps
Falling deeper into the past
Granite mirrors, mincing with guilt
Exposures, taped together backwards and inside out
My life is an alibi for reality
Dipped in *******, surfing on opiates
I was sick
Too ill to cope with enlightenment
Too stupid to hate myself.

I'll make my home where I dream
In hotel beds and in cars
On the roadside and in pity
Food crumbled on blankets
Lifestyle in overkill
In hope that travelers see
I make my home where I please.