Category: sustainability

call to fascxiom

hoover’s hematemesis
vomited bubbling out windows
down crumblingmortar oxidizedaluminum moldyvinalwood
into buried earthlung springs
mccarthy’s melena
served mysterymeat
in soupkitchen with sugaredwater
largetracing arsenicleadbenzene
nixon’s necrosis
spreading comfortmutation.
wallace’s stent
scalpaling steelsword
excise resist reject from electricbody

wallace statue in druid hill park at sunrise
(dorothy rose blumberg, later convicted and jailed for advocating for better minimum wages and against discrimination and against abuse of civil liberties, was trailed by many fbi agents in 1952 around reservoir hill where she lived, including on her trips to druid hill park)

waverly

sacked by kingstroops
wanton mischief pavement shattered
doors windows demolished
furniture fragments
family pictures ground tatters
fruit-trees down
fragments scattered around
shivered explosion shadows
they come upon leave us in extremitie
red moon through clouds where the dead shall be

shopping center at sunrise
(in 1951 the waverly redevelopment project razed blocks of integrated rowhouses to support aggressive segregationist policy, with help, either bungling or cynical, from the federal housing administration)

duly executed

bodies corporate perpetuating duration percentum
sheltering rent property public
dwelling not with standing
aggregating mutual covenants
whereof
witness
safety healthy morals

city hall dome at sunrise
(in 1949 over 2000 city residents railed at a city council meeting against unisolated public housing)

anthropomorphine

liberty in
losing using
ones own money in ones own way
or someones else notwatchings
finance unmediocre
money as light coursing
numbing strange selfsuffocatingabortion
accelerating phoenixcinders

stock exchange at sunrise
(the baltimore stock exchange, at 210 east redwood street, closed and merged with the philadelphia stock exchange, NASDAQ OMX PHLX, in 1949)

inharmonious undesign

unconstrained combustion
fuels illusorycompressed timespace
leaving seemingempty places
sortofnotreally littered
with concentrated purchases
stateless events
anthrofrenzy

shopping center at sunrise
(the edmonson village shopping center, the city’s first suburban mall, opened in 1947 on edmondson avenue)

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)

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)