"slum" poems
From the ripple in a glass of water
to the sonic boom of this internal
Pompeii, the erosion
of her etymology is the only
sense of movement in her
dilated, cave-pupil eyes, those
two ghost towns spanning
and encircling all the way back,
stretched like an elastic blindfold
past the moment the first brick was laid,
perhaps her first vivid memory,
or anecdote, or first word uttered
in a Cuban slum.
There are mountains of tumbleweed
over the once thriving metropolis
that expanded towards America;
who threw herself into
the architecture of seven pillars,
borne from her land and
minerals. Gone are the
huts that housed her
knowledge of basic motor skills.
The women who once imagined
Mami and Mima as her birth
name now scrub off
the graffiti of her excrement;
they saw a swarm of pink moons
the day she told the same story
to every visitor that came
their way, each day then becoming
a missing surveillance tape, a sinkhole
dismantling the awareness
in her bones and stubborn will,
until she became
these dust-engulfed plains with
a daughter and granddaughter
archeological in their efforts
to chase down the remains
of a girl still breathing in
those eyes from time to time.
Every other ten-millionth blink of
the eye rides the silhouette of a post-infant girl
on the high tides of her quick visit,
looking in horror
as the nation of her life's nightmares,
heartaches, broken promises, romances,
spiritual breakthroughs, life-changing seconds
drowns with morbid unity en cien fuegos,
desperately attempting to assemble
the remnants of her psyche
past her cognitive bloodclots
with the awareness of one
who speaks no languages.
Gone is the moment
she first learned
to feed her several children
before the slip of sunset.
One of seven pillars remain intact,
the others long dismantled of their
stick and straw infrastructures.
One pillar remained,
housed her own colony
for nine months,
and now both descendants
travel the mind of their
greatest influence
with perplexed dedication,
caustic humor the decoy
for swarms of exhaustion
and asphyxiation
from the truthful atmosphere,
reveling in the seconds
of humanity lurking
in an abandoned etymology.
Jun 29, 2010
Jun 29, 2010 at 11:19 AM UTC
Devil's downstairs
at the neighbors
lil'
hole in the wall.
We're just sitting
ducks
in a government funded
housing pond.
& I'm too afraid
to sleep.
In my own slum.
Thank you, for ruining my life.
Jul 12, 2012
Jul 12, 2012 at 1:57 PM UTC
Ice cream ninety nine
I know you make my lips taste fine
I need a big one mister
give me your large ice cream, ninety nine
We hear you coming
with lame tunes, Mmm pretty shifty
but we love to see you here
in our slum of a f>>king city
Yet Ice cream man
your sauce is tasty
and the blood you put on
makes kid's like us factory
Come back ice cream man
just one more ninety nine
come on ice cream man
let us bleed you dry again
By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka Neonsolaris
By NeonSolaris
© 2013 NeonSolaris (All rights reserved)
Nov 3, 2013
Nov 3, 2013 at 6:03 AM UTC
a bottle of scotch had bad dreams.
bullets twitch, junk sick
in 3 inch thick
mustard ****
toe nails clipped from yeti
lay strewn about the **** stained corpse
of a motel six dixie cup -
root canal trophy,
next to
a black fez
with scab tassel
upended.
down in it. belching apnea
propaganda
and belladonna
waiting for curious george
to find a shotgun
and a yellow
hat
and a brick banana.
blowflies inhale the rank damp
of a fresh ****
the odd dog whines
like a clown in -
a blender.
[ the ]
house wins
with a marked card; jabbing fat fingers
into acned rosacea
bloated with sleep lack
and mortgage
back stab
chasing twenty ******
with a hollow point
pull from an acid
flask
while hailing a black cab.
tinsel sutures
stitch eyelids as a mercy
shattered bone knit
hand-grenade
cozies
old glory, at half mast
half wasted
fifty stars, no light
dragging on
the grounds of immunity
to do a line
of coke stock
with a basset hounds'
finesse.
your taxes at work
in columbia,
hiding from a lost farm
in Idaho
your american dream
turning tricks in shanghai
for a counterfeit
egga roll
your meme, devoid
like an ice cube
tombstone
your freedom, parking cars
for italian escorts
smoking skin flutes
for ferraris
and white teeth.
your integrity, sold to a hedge fund
for astroglide and a pez dispenser
packed with prozac
pressed by ' Jose the butcher' s abuela
in a narco slum
that ain't seen radio
since cinder blocks
had wings.
Dec 26, 2012
Dec 26, 2012 at 2:40 PM UTC
I used to believe in good old days,
Still concerned about the little ways.
To get back in my childhood era.
Those uncountable acquaintances,
Now they are just faded faces.
Buzzing around oftentimes,
I do look at them with all my gracious Rhymes.
Those long sandwalks, I heard many voices & those preacher talks.
Standing on the top of a pile,
I saw the world with my pure human eyes.
My incapability of not performing as others,
Don’t forget we came from different mothers.
Though the course may be disturbingly fascinating,
Spot you there at the end of the lives you kept devastating.
I walked clean and I did no mean.
There was nothing to fear, but one day someone molested me who was so near.
Crippled inside myself that night,
Was so devastated couldn’t spoke a word inspite.
Moments still glare, dig in your knife so that you can pare.
Shadows no more controls me,
I fiercely play with them, and still move freely.
Enjoyed every bit just like my first bicycle wheelie.
I did both,from playing with slum folks to slept like a sloth.
Now I miss my never ending era.
Entered my puberty,
with little bit of curiosity
To not to have those thoughts control authority.
I was wild, a state called child.
Aug 23, 2018
Aug 23, 2018 at 2:49 PM UTC
He lives in a time of plague.
The tag team of cholera and dedication killed his father, for all Dr. Juvenal Urbino knows, his father was faithful to both work and love.
The good doctor knew from an early age that his work would be his love, and from a slightly less tender age he discovered that his love of flesh and the body ran deeper than mere science could take him.
He met Fermina Daza in the doorway between clinical curiosity and obsession over her doe’s gait, and as he walked through his heart made room for a new kind of dedication.
He thought his devotion would be equally as precise as his practice.
Fifteen or so years of marriage, between years in Paris they bled together like a Van Gogh after a rainshower, the intricacies of their companionship were jointly held in a contractual cradle, but neither of them felt obligated.
Dr. Urbino was before my time, but my story will know the life of Carlos Mucharraz, Pre-Med major, they both dedicate themselves to their love. I’ve never seen her, but I can imagine Carlos likens her gait to that of a doe. He fawns over her from 17 hours away, for nearly a year.
Like a Texas dust devil, he sends his love through the air to Minneapolis to brighten her phone screen and her day.
They’ve only ever spent time together twice.
I’d like to think of his devotion like a boulder, immovable, but twisters slither across prairies as wicked winds push them towards seas of lust, but I’d like to think his love flew above turbulent skies.
I thought Dr. Urbino as a rock.
He must have thought of his fidelity as a disease. His father died fighting cholera, and Urbino would not let his affliction of faithfulness **** him. He thought himself ill, and the mantra of his practice taught him one thing only: cure.
In a slum of San Juan de la Cienaga, pants around his ankles, holding a mulatto girl’s legs around his waist, he crumbled like stale bread as he plunged himself into infidelity.
This man of granite broke and fragmented, his sin etched a crooked cobweb of fractures into his back, I wonder if the beads of sweat stung his spine, or dulled the pain.
But maybe I should put my faith in dust devils.
Humans may be able to shatter the hardest stone, but no one commands the sky, for it straddles North and South, East and West, Fort Worth and Minneapolis.
Jul 1, 2013
Jul 1, 2013 at 7:20 PM UTC
They say after the rainbow,
come the *** of gold,
But if you look on my end,
You'd see treasure being sold.
All our riches are scarce,
For a drug and firearm
Why is there much danger
If we have not caused harm?
Yesterday, my son smiled
To a rainbow in the slum,
Knowing that it hasn't left,
Because this is where it comes from.
They say after the storm
Comes the rainbow,
Leaving us hope in life
Like a guardian angel.
If we stick together
To help one another
The slum will be
Prosperous again, my brother.
At seven months, my son smile
To a rainbow in the slum,
Knowing, that it hasn't left,
Because this is where it comes from.
Peace...
Where it comes from?
Joy...
Where it comes from?
Happiness...
Where it comes from?
Unity...
Where it comes from?
Love...
Where it comes from?
A rainbow in the slum
Mar 7, 2014
Mar 7, 2014 at 10:39 AM UTC
We met in back alleys
Trailer trash, slum lords
We laid in the gutter
We crawled on life's floor
I traveled the world
In slumber and sloth
I bled the world dry
And nearly fell off
Treading grey matter
Until the quickening set in
I survived the world
Now a new one begins...
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 10:23 AM UTC
Once when I saw a *******
Gasping slowly his last days with the white plague,
Looking from hollow eyes, calling for air,
Desperately gesturing with wasted hands
In the dark and dust of a house down in a slum,
I said to myself
I would rather have been a tall sunflower
Living in a country garden
Lifting a golden-brown face to the summer,
Rain-washed and dew-misted,
Mixed with the poppies and ranking hollyhocks,
And wonderingly watching night after night
The clear silent processionals of stars.
3.4k
I crawled into your back pocket quietly and folded myself up small, like the smoke from the cigarettes you always lit but never smoked.
I bumped into your last name everywhere because I may have managed to escape the slum but we all crawl back to where our hearts first beat.
You escaped with a lens in your fist and roads I will never drive down, buried deep in your feet.
I sat on your shoulders and kept quiet. I watched every girl you fell in love with and I felt burns on my hands every time one pushed your hair back out from your eyes.
The girl from Missouri with the long brown hair counted 49 freckles but I knew about the 2 that were kept hidden under your knees and I scolded every girl who thought they loved you like I did.
I sleep with bones who cry out for my touch but sometimes they whisper for a girl whose name is different from my own. Her name tastes like sewage in the back of my throat.
I know love because I curled his hair around my finger. And I know that someday my children with have a head full of it.
But when you taught me love it was filled with new beginnings. But you went too far and I waved you off and sat back in the dust I had come from and told myself I was better off and you were crazy.
You traveled through towns I may never know and shook hands with people I will never see. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if we kept holding hands. Mine got sweaty and your long legs moved too fast. My heart became heavy and held me down. You
Sometimes I sleep across your room on the old blue chair with my back towards you. Sometimes I hear you whisper my name and I know you still feel my hands slipping up your shirt and drawing constellations of how our future should have mapped out between freckles and old acne scars.
Apr 14, 2014
Apr 14, 2014 at 9:37 PM UTC
From the slums of mexico city
To the avenue of Hollywood,
Around the bin of saks fifth avenue.
To the know it all's, and all be goods.
In the hoods, where ghetto girls are sweet
Some are called hood bunnies
Junkies are the daily keeps.
I sleep sweet now I got out of
Mexico city's way of life.
The ghetto one
The slum one
The hood one
Not saks fifth avenue.
The hood,
Gangster avenue.
Oct 5, 2015
Oct 5, 2015 at 9:16 PM UTC
Aye, Montecelli, that's the name.
You may have heard of him perhaps.
Yet though he never savoured fame,
Of those impressionistic chaps,
Monet and Manet and Renoir
He was the avatar.
He festered in a Marseilles slum,
A starving genius, god-inspired.
You'd take him for a lousy ***
Tho' poetry of paint he lyred,
In dreamy pastels each a gem: . . .
How people laughed at them!
He peddled paint from bar to bar;
From sordid rags a jewel shone,
A glow of joy and colour far
From filth of fortune woe-begone.
'Just twenty francs,' he shyly said,
'To take me drunk to bed.'
Of Van Gogh and Cezanne a peer;
In dreams of ecstasy enskied,
A genius and a pioneer,
Poor, paralysed and mad he died:
Yet by all who hold Beauty dear
May he be glorified!
2.6k
A nerd bitten by the charity bug,
Spoke of slum children’s education
And shining darkness in their eyes.
In the shanties ,the water flows
Like a shadow in cloudy daylight
And smells bad to the kind rich.
My check glistens in the dark
Like a meteorite on a dark night
In the next moment it vanishes
In the depths of hunger and belly.
Other men have fat bank accounts
But are spiritual for soul-hunger.
Poetry sounds crassly out of place-
One would wish the black sewer
Is not talked about in prose as well.
May 20, 2010
May 20, 2010 at 6:07 PM UTC
Carrickfergus (1937) - poem by Louis Macneice.
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams;
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn mill called it's funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.
I was the rectors son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long;
A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge
Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront;
Marching at ease and singing 'Who Killed **** Robin?'
The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.
The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England-
Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;
I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar
be always rationed and that never again
Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags
And my governess not make bandages from moss
And people not have maps above the fireplace
With flags on pins moving across and across-
Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,
Flares across the night,
Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,
A cage across their sight.
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines
And the soldiers with their guns.
Louis Macneice
Jun 17, 2016
Jun 17, 2016 at 8:54 AM UTC
Oh Jesus time by the pink and purple sunset
Thinking of a traveling guitar boy,
of chai sleep broken by dying beggars
all trying to tell me something.
If the ocean lights don't call us home
we could backpack to the crocodile places
eat thirteen camels with the people
smoke tea and rainy day cigarettes.
Heartache sits like snow on the roof
of the hollow hut Connecticut.
The kids tried too many times for nothing.
Mom dream better for me
Wear your peace face
I'm trying to change
You're talking France nostalgia while upstairs
the weaver makes seven-dollar laments
for international slum chickens.
We can't do better than the break-bone average
reading scorched Chalbi newspapers
hacking coughs and statii soup for company.
Bukowski's in Mumbai eating cheddar
My siblings are in cages down in Egypt
The Spanish Communist cowboys
spill Turkana survivors on the floor of the Greyhound bus
Is there a hood idealist, ghetto healer?
My Sacramento roommate's drinking skeleton coffee
in the bathtub, she's got the Arab fever, so have I,
and not much else but these crazy plague jackets
this hungry smoking December
and Rumi's kids in cold-bread streets with protest signs.
We're easier taught the panic than the magic or the save,
There's too much strange and midnight waste.
You didn't know I needed you but you came through.
You're shimmering in clothes of saxaphone
Mar 6, 2013
Mar 6, 2013 at 2:03 AM UTC
The Hispanic breeds are being scared off lately,
They don’t speak much English,
I don’t speak much Spanish,
But I remember when I was a little boy,
White boy in a brown body,
Nestled in a blanket in a slum apartment,
Surrounded by grizzly, Mexican men,
All with breath of stale beer,
They’re faded blue like their work shirts,
And I was young and golden,
They were all my friends,
The air, oily with the smell of fried tortillas,
My own eyes wide,
My hair long, over my ears,
A worn, mongrel, Mexican boy.
Nov 8, 2014
Nov 8, 2014 at 2:06 AM UTC
They were like two peas in a pod
Holding hands
Exchanging tongues
Being prissy and laughing at those
Who long before saw their act
Though those two queers, they don’t see at all
They are midgets, and little, and erectly small
With puffed up chests
Stroking hens of the Cornish variety
All of them dregs of a social society
Slum lords and criminal minds
Under the sheets where no one sees
Which one is giving the other the shaft
**** and span they use after, oh so daft
One erotically whispered to the other
A Pain in the ***
As they kissed over their biblical wine glass
Seeking solace in each others arms
Licking their wounds with grammars charm
Grown men, committing sin after sin
Then blaming others for saying
God wants you to begin
Acting like men
And not emancipated boys
Stop diddling and twiddling
Leave alone your petite toys
One day Jehovah will make clear
Belittle others is worse than Queer
Little queens swallowing their own vile
While Ladies and Gentleman laugh
At the ****** and the Clown
In their lingerie and gown
God decried, let those two drown
Even Lucifer laughed under his frown
Mar 15, 2017
Mar 15, 2017 at 10:48 PM UTC
To be taken silently with violence
Not to utter a salutation
Just the cracking of a door hinge
And a look that indicates that stopping your desires would be laughable
An absurdity
not to be pondered!
The jolting sound of head cracking against metal
And wrist yearning to be ground to the bone
After hours of furtive clutching
The kind on nail bending fervor that just takes the taste right from bread
Grabbed into a cranium synthesis
Im am forever enslaved in the darkest corridor of your existence
I doubt I will ever be able to leave this lighting wasteland
The eagerness pounding through the point were skin meets weapon
I am infiltrated like a shanty filled village
A real slum filled valley
Hopeless against tracking systems and torture methods
You plunder my underdeveloped hospitality
Like Jesus to a farm boy
As I scream **** you Mongoloid
I am gasping into your filth
A sacrificial lamb
Bliss by the slaughter wells
Mouthfuls of disgust
As your knees jab deep into skid row
Grinding the forgotten and the deserted
Until they are flattened corpses
****** dry of the water holding them together
You are pleased
The phantom has been fed and to ask for seconds would only tease the lamb
As I lay gushing organs with a smirk
Broken bent and emaciated
I feel alive and it is wondrous.
Nov 30, 2010
Nov 30, 2010 at 9:02 AM UTC
From different times of splender our hearts go out to thee ,
in troubled times when the crow returns to it's stag to pluck and proon , and the mornings dew has cast it's spell ,
as if the shades of the berries in the forest have now all gone ,
and the grave was never entered ,
the church was never built .
How then if when the gates were never
shut .
not crushed to death by hungry crowds.
and Tom to dock yards went so he
could buy some bread ,
to feed his wife and child .
The love they felt when they were fed
on this Christmas morning.
As children played
or begged ,
or stole to feed their swollen bellies ,
in slum streets this day ,
a feast didst lay afore them .
Lamb roasted on a spit ,
Tom's door was now flung open ,
No more hunger ,
No more shackles of rent man ,
poor house years ,
then ****** tears shivering in dark infested boxes .
Yet to this day a child was born into
this poverty ,
to save ,
amidst wise men and donkey.
Then a crow with eager eye picked a snake did wrestle ,
took it away ,
it's beak it's prey ,
rose to catch the dawn .
For a bud was formed
not in autumn
not on June ,
did it blossom
but out of hardship did it lay ,
out of a forgotten tommrow .
Dec 24, 2018
Dec 24, 2018 at 4:06 PM UTC
I called to you
softly when I
was young; my
voice bounced off
the bricks of a
suburban slum,
sauntered down
side streets and
stirred piles of
leaves, then snagged
in the branches till
the wind tore it free
to collapse at your
window like a
weary songbird
that had been
singing for decades
and finally, you heard.
Feb 22, 2016
Feb 22, 2016 at 8:21 PM UTC
I see you blinking
in the summer sun.
I take you drinking
in the gutter slum.
You sit there
and you read your poems
and you stare where,
you stare where you should just go!
No Morse code! No Morse code!
Gotta find three of these-
three of these that fit...an angel couldn't laugh-
I would laugh! I would laugh!
No Morse code!
I figure the fragments are all black;
I figure the fragments are all
stagnant and all black!
No Morse code! No Morse code!
Ex facto!
I see you blinking
in the summer sun.
I take you drinking
in the gutter slum.
You stare where...
and you stare where...
Sep 5, 2012
Sep 5, 2012 at 10:19 PM UTC
I have lost my way,
please draw me an arrow
Five corners of slum
Deep in the boroughs
A decayed old soul
with smells of masters
Alcohol and poisons, mixed
Death comes much faster
Living in a box,
discarded like trash
Pushing farther below
Slum *** Crash
Oct 29, 2014
Oct 29, 2014 at 1:15 AM UTC
A slum outside Paris
A cardboard city thrives a place where no one has
to pay the rent and electricity are purloined.
is it impossible for middle -class folk to understand
but the Roma thrive despite living by a city dump
where you dump your trash wash your hand and are
happy to live in a block of flats and house the rules.
Now they want to get rid of this illegal city that cost
nothing to run and need not tramlines. But they are
not like us do not share our values, no they are not
like us the do not deplete the world's resources and
when the last car has stopped the Gypsies will as they
always have done crossing the landscape with their children
women and dogs carried pulled donkeys on ancient carts.
And the man with a wristwatch and finery will offer
them riches for a lift to better times.
Aug 15, 2015
Aug 15, 2015 at 3:38 AM UTC