Poetry / Alphabet City, USA

Alphabet City, USA

By: J.J. Kinni

Give me the podium
And let me tell you my story.
I’m taking you on a tailspin
Through the thoughts of the shadiest city…
Alphabet City, USA.
Come and see the dirt…
Revel in the despair.
Every sin in the world is on display to witness.
Come and take a glance
At what the world is and what you…
Us allowed it to become.

Filth
Grime
Drugs
Despotism
Senseless anarchy
Sex
Disease
Murder
And rape…
Rape of our past…
Rape of our present…
Rape of our future…
Rape of the whole world and everything in it.

From high atop
The tenement buildings housing the desolate and demonized,
You can catch glimpse of all of me.
All of my inner workings, all of my fears, all of my hopes,
All of what makes me what I am.
Those residing inside me,
Scurry about the streets
With dirt under their nails
And chill coursing through their veins.

When I take one of them, he is replaced, like a sharks tooth.
We are all sharks in this god-forsaken world.
Cutting through the wakes of motorists trying to catch us…
Kill us…mount us…and treat us a prize.
They chum the waters with drugs and violence…
Segregation and intimidation…
Sex and disease.
All in an attempt to round us up into livestock
For fighting their wars, and breaking our backs for them…
What isn’t used is discarded and never thought of again…
Until the next election.

Where’s the crusader for the poor…
The fighter against injustice…
The lover of all mankind.
If the messiah saved mankind…
He forgot about the people of Alphabet City,
USA that is…
Where we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps
And make something of ourselves
Like our white fathers before us.

Lies
Damned lies.
That’s all those in Washington have for us.
War on drugs…war on the poor…war on us…
Shit runs down hill money runs up.
In the land of the free,
The conman is king
Dancing on the soul of my city.
Tap dancing to the tune of a million souls
Crying out voiceless in the night:
Wishing for a better morning that will never come.
To watch yourself die from the inside out
Brings a whole new outlook on what you are…
What you’ve become…and what you once were.
Until you’ve watched yourself rot away,
You haven’t felt pain.
The pain in my buildings that leak and corrode.
The clotting in my streets that make me fever and sweat.
The nothingness that comes with it all,
And everything that is left behind,
Makes me cold and hopeless in the winter night
And hot and tempered in the summer sun.

Warmness in the winter comes from a fire in a pail.
Coolness in the summer comes from a hydrant on my streets.
But neither is enough to bring back the shade…
To bring back the warmth.

Frost bitten and sun burned we move on…
With quite desperation, we pray and pray.
Pray for the poachers and vultures to leave.
Leaving us to build ourselves back up,
Allowing us to grow in greatness.
Allow us to cultivate our children and our children’s children.
Let them grow and become more to the world than lost shadows of the night.

Shadows that lurk
In the deepest and darkest depths of my cities soul,
Sitting in the damp depravity of my darkest alleys,
Waiting for daylight to fall and the demons in us to come.
Horrid sickness that comes alongside the moon
Ties my stomach in knots.
Churning me up and doubling me over,
On my knees before the night and that bitch moon.

But that’s alright.
We’ll be alright.
We’ll sell the poisons you give us,
We’ll steal the cars you drive,
We’ll buy the house next door…
Then will you listen?
Then will you do your civic duty?

Protests on the capital…
Speak for us without a voice…
Open the minds of the jaded
And fill the holes with unsightly scenes
Of my daily horrors and daily sorrows.

Reopen my factories.
So fathers won’t leave their families
Out of embarrassment for there own mortality.
So sons won’t sell drugs on the corners of my streets.
So daughters won’t sell their body for a quick shot.
So mothers won’t sell their souls to feed their children.
So the town can grow and build together.
So streets can find some relief
From all the ruckus that rocks the gravel loose
And overflows the sewers below.

You’ve watched me burn
While you roasted marsh mellows over my fire.
I scream for water to extinguish the flames
Burning away my history.
I tell you it will benefit,
That you won’t be sorry.
But all you see is guns and drugs,
Hookers and HIV,
And all the other results of civic malnourishment.

When we riot for what we believe
You call us animals.
When we loot the vacant shops
You call us criminals.
When we live by a code none of you can understand,
You put us in prison.
You say we are a sickness,
A poor and volatile being incapable of growing above it.
“Pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” you would say.
“That is what American’s do.”
If it was all so simple.
First we need boots.
Those with all the boots sit on their porches
Out in some distant ranch hundreds of miles from me.

Benefits are held…
Programs are constructed…
People are paid…
People are paid…
People are paid…
And we starve.
A thousand dollars a plate dinner for save the whales,
Or the tree’s in the rainforest…
The chickens in the chicken coops of Perdue…
The beef behind Burger King’s empire…
And anything else you could think to care about
Other than the problems at home.
I am burning.
Stop saving the chickens and save me.
How can we be so naïve
As to think we can fix all the problems of the world
When we can’t even fix the problems in ourselves?
It’s a fucked up thing.

It’s a fucked up thing
When your born free
Yet never have a moment of freedom.
And those that control your freedom
Make laws affecting your life and were you live,
Yet never knew what it was like to walk on my cities streets…
Go to school in my cities schools…
Make a living in my cities economy.
They have no conception of what any of it is.
They cut a ribbon,
Pull a lever,
And break ground,
And then they’re whisked away.
Not to be seen again,
But collecting well earned donations
On the way out of town.

Maybe
When enough white college undergraduates
Are murdered at the hands of grad students,
Then they will feel the need to take the guns out of my cities.
So I pine for that time
When blood no longer flows through the streets of me.
Where my children can open there eyes to a loving sun,
One that warms the self and the soul.
Or a moon that watches over
Like the mother she is to us all.

If you want truth,
I’ll give you truth.
I’ll give you truth by the tenement building full.
Truth so real and so horrid
That it will leave you damaged and scarred forever.
Scarred so bad on the soul that all the angels in heaven
Or even god himself couldn’t take away what is left.

The people of my city all have scars.
It’s good to have scars.
Scars give character.
Scars tell stories.
Scars enlighten those who see them.
Scars are one thing this country has plenty of.
Scars of heroics…
Scars of pain…
Scars of the heart…
Scars of life;
Life that has run you down,
And beaten you up.
That drags you to its bottom
Keeping you down for as long as it can,
Never relenting.
When we sleep life is there,
Waiting for us to challenge it once more.
Awaking each morning
It greets us with empty cupboards
And warm freezers.
Our days start and end on emptiness,
A hollowness that grows inside all of us.
We walk empty with cries getting swept away
By the wind more and more each day.

These are the pains that we feel everyday.
These are the injustices of me,
The injustices of all society.
We are all to blame.
The rich
The poor
The working-class,
We all have contributed to the widening gap
Between freedom and the ghetto.
Between safety and danger.
Between happiness and hate.
Between walking out the front door
And seeing all the possibilities of the world at your fingertips,
And seeing that concrete jungle
Were only the strong survive
And you reside.