There’s no one out at four in the mourning
the streets are empty and all I ever want to do
is crawl back into bed and pretend that the world is not ending
one person at a time
it’s like driving through a haze of smoke
with cops and whores basking in the glow
of harshly colored streetlights and cigarette cherries
malt liquor bottles and shoes hang from a high tension wire as
I roll down the street and look back at the faces
looking at me with bad intentions
malt liquor bottles sparkle in the night and someone’s shoes
hang from a high tension wire
where warriors stare down their own reflections on the tinted glass
as we do our own drive-by
in this neighborhood
and light up the night sky once again
I know just as well as they do that we don’t belong
here but we go anyway because that’s the job
it becomes a cheap form of entertainment
on the nights when the dead are not doing their job
we are detached – mere spectators with blood on our gloved hands
and memories in our back pockets like cigarette burns
these streets make the headlines every morning
and every day I come back for more
fuck reality television
this is the news
- SJR
Recently, a local high school (Mandarin High) removed a book from its 10th-grade reading list due to one parent’s complaint that the words on a page near the end of the book were too shocking, vulgar, horrific, profane, the end of all civility etc. The book in question? “Graceland” by Chris Abani. The book has won numerous awards and is a popular choice for high school reading lists across the country. So why would anyone find it objectionable?
Is it the sometimes over-the-top violence in the book? No, The LA Times reports, “”Graceland” includes passages of brutal violence, but it is the sexual content of a torture scene that the Florida mother found objectionable.”
Fair enough…this isn’t porno we’re talking about here but literature – celebrated, award-winning literature. One parent becomes outraged at a single page in a book yet there are innumerable advertisements, films, songs and print ads that are just as sexually suggestive and or violent that kids get bombarded with daily. Helen Lovejoy is not beckoning for anyone to please think of the children when the film “Kick Ass” is heralded by teens so why is the book so offensive?
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They stabbed a guy here for $3 yesterday Continue reading »
the paper said the kids who did it were looking for gas money
and answers to questions never asked
Action News shoves a microphone in the victim’s face
they want to know how he feels,
even as he bleeds to death in the middle of a busy intersection
where the people are too preoccupied with their phones and coffee to care
the family wants to know why and
the camera’s eye turns to the audience
who has already changed the channel in search of the next fix
I cannot listen to Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys without getting nauseated. Not because I don’t like the Beach Boys but because listening to it reminds me of arriving in Florida and mistaking it for California. I have a feeling that had the ‘Boys been stuck in Jacksonville, Florida, the song would have been entirely different.
Years ago, I walked away from everything I knew in the blink of an eye and landed in the most unlikely of places. If I had a dollar for every time a local asks me, “Why here?” I would never go hungry. In my mind, what I was heading for resembled a cross between Scarface and every Beach Boys song ever created. I was wrong. I was wrong in ways I could have never imagined. Like a wayward explorer looking for the fabled new world, I discovered something different entirely and it has never ceased to remind me of just how wrong I was.
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They are shootin’ mother fuckers here
like it’s going out of style
and the people cheer!
two more added to the toll this A.M.
the summer heat has not yet begun
but the eggs are already frying on the sidewalk
amidst the White chalk outlines and under the watch of overseers
on horses, action cameras and microphones
and the almighty eye of the church downtown
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