Tag: baltimore

three ways

painful pillows hold my head in vice
sloshing radiators overheat bowels
words saidunsaid needle hurting space
in fetal blueskinned sluggish confusion
out to frostyclear dawnlight
moist easterlies
three softslowstepping laps
eutaw baltimore greene lombard
eutaw baltimore greene lombard
eutaw baltimore greene lombard
everabsssorbing cobalt blue
fizzzbuzzz
trainsss leaving sssouth

cobalt blue at sunrise
(the emerson bromo seltzer tower on lombard and eutaw streets was the tallest skyscraper in the city from 1911 to 1923)

inpatientcity

breathing shallow sweating dizzy
numb blurred not thinking through
diagprescribed
fractionally distilled elixirpolymers
combpestled
mechanical opiates of directforce
supremely lucrative to attending charlycians
breathingeatingpissingshitting monetizedlifeforce
incapitalpathology

powerplant at sunrise
(in 1948 the national city lines holding company funded by gm, standard oil, firestone, and phillips added complete control of the baltimore transit company, which was powering electric streetcars from its plant on pratt street, to its collection of almost fifty soon-to-be disinvested and dismantled city streetcar utilities across the country)

two lights on behind

my baby left me
leaving hate
thinking memory pain
fading understanding why
consciousness unaffected
here with less
is somehow more and more
unemptying emptiness

train and lake after sunrise
(in 1948 a majority of maryland, and baltimore city, voters approved a constitutional amendment authored by baltimore county that restricted the city’s ability to grow)

i believe him

come out here
swollen fruit dumped chemicals long evaporated
into struggle to worklive with respect
and desperation-bred grandiose plans
with new money
from dubai-on-patapsco

from seabury road at sunrise
(cherry hill homes public housing opened in 1945 after the end of world war II—cherry hill is between the middle branch, patapsco river, west patapsco avenue, and 295)

aint it truth

short life shorter youth no other
chew mealy apples chased with gin
phones ringless in mud
begging for moments
haters lovers cash and carry
your innerfish sauteed in streamingsun and flowers
swallow wideyed at ringing bells
someone step out of rainbow
rocking
it could be you

pennsylvania at upton at sunrise
(private thomas broadus was murdered by officer edward bender in 1942 on pennsylvania avenue after a louis armstrong show–2,000 people later marched to annapolis to protest racist police brutality)

professor shitwater

me thy sanitizer
put shit in thy harbor
me thy onedollarman
put ironsulfur in thy lungs
me thy envirosultant
put cyanibenzene in thy cells
very few harbors in the world are clean
yup its raining dollars
my purse is around here somewhere

brownfields at sunrise
(abel wolman propped up industrial polluters with pseudoscience and shared greed, earning more than the city from his 1940 scheme to sell lightly-treated city sewage to bethlehem steel for industrial use and subsequent dumping into the patapsco—harbor area groundwater had already been depleted and polluted)

honor of selection

common standard
achievement housing health wellbeing
decent living
pleasing and worthy
for up and coming
substandardly housed people in need
carefully selected mainly family
in doomed wasteful toxic industry of allocation
more difficult than providing for all

affordable housing at sunrise
(poe homes affordable housing opened in 1940 on lexington and freemont streets with 298 of 1500 applicants delighted to have a basic human right fulfilled)