"Head Start" or "Seventeen Concrete Things" - A Poem Alone

Over the city’s waste management system

immortal autumn leaves burn and fly.

Below the tracks where the metal mammoth throbs,

reek rises, rot spools around the graffitied viaduct.

I am unmoved by decay.

The empty lot is just ahead, the dirt

ground of childhood stickball never played. 

Green awnings remain on the house,

as sentimental as poverty.

This is where I was raised.

One streetlight glows and sings a

magnetic, comfortable humm.  When

I return to my suburban home I know that

there are halogen bulbs burning

for no one who’s there.  For certain

there is bread and cheese, whole wheat

and guerre.  My heavy gut aches.

The boys on the stoop don’t call

me Leche Blanca or seniorina anymore. 

They eye me, suspicious of my shoes.

The girls wonder whose baby I’m expecting

to remove.  The old men at the tavern nod.

Cigarettes ash in plastic, tin, glass.

In some lined pockets of humanity

a new zygote swims, building like religion. 

The many textures of death, like ichors,

engulf me.  My death will come late

and medicated.  The boys

looking at my shoes will be lucky

to turn twenty.  What youthful mother,

a figure on her lap, finds

splintered compensation for the pangs of birth

and the uncertainty of setting forth?

There used to be more.  In the generation

between the men at the tavern

and the boys on the stoop. 

Some things were unsplintered.

Thirty years (and more than years)

have slinked past since

the warehouse was headquarters.

Deep in the dark loathsome city

our childhood foundations were

built on seventeen concrete things.

At five, the Panthers taught us

phonics, fed us breakfast.  We learned reform,

rebellion in certain terms.  Militant kindness and love

for the sake of it bred like disease. Our leaders

deserted the neighborhood, hunted for their skins.

The gangs came.  We moved. 

I was privileged and I moved on.

But I go back to the stone and dirt and

hateful love like a vice because

I know these children are built of

stone, but they’re built on sand;

low-rent property is

ideology, not geography.  It is found

in the sterilized sunshine of

an uncommitted purse, rising with the

eternal morning of capitalism and God.

I falter, confused.  I am an undesirable conundrum. 

The was no romance in our poverty. I remember

the concrete; I can still smell

basic arithmetic and bacon; I

rhythm while I write: pancakes and

Power, hashbrowns and values.

Today my shoes cost too much, and my

house is too big, and I have success

in excess.  And the boys

on the stoop eye me, and the girls

suspect, and the old men nod.

Outside I am white and my clean

hands are futile. The rising sun smells antiseptic.

Embracing it, heat caresses me,

soldering my limber spine.