My '92 (published in Foglifter Volume 2 Issue 2)
April 29, 2017.
Man, these winds!
LA’s anxiety is effervescent.
Must be the pangs of
TWENTY-
FIVE
years ago today
when South Central looked
like the Olympic cauldron
from above.
Today is the anniversary
of not waiting any longer.
Their fury and pain
passed on, one generation’s
fire lit the next,
grew tall like cypress trees
stronger
against the winds of
neglect.
Doesn’t feel good to be
treated
without dignity.
To have it rubbed in your
face
that profits are at all
costs; shitty schools,
jerky roads, crowded health
facilities
and non-living-wage-jobs.
Young men’s lives
stuffed into small boxes
with metal bars for profit.
Or in mahogany coffins
dropped six feet
underground.
Black and Brown boys
Stowed away, your keeps sake.
Urban communities pay for
your profits
even beaten out of us
like the air that escaped
our chests
when the verdict was read.
Doesn’t feel good to feel
like you can’t breath.
Concentrated poverty.
What else to focus on
when it’s so dense it chokes
us
like the fumes from burning
city
burning lungs;
like lead and other poisons
festering in our soil.
Food deserts eroding
nutrition, freeways corralling
our quarters, darkening our
ozone.
I need some water
but I don’t trust it.
Water is life.
Brown water
is jaundiced, red blood
cells breaking down.
Blood floods, flooded, flooding
our streets.
Jaundiced
we ain’t envious
Motha’ fucker
we are tired
Motha’ fucker.
Call us Marxist, communist,
socialist,
anarchist or your favorite
THUGS
we’re tearing shit down.
Sociologist Robert Parks
says is supposed to be “natural”
to segregate in the city
through economic, political
and cultural influences.
Rain is natural,
it comes when it wants, ask
Cali.
The sun is natural
see it RISE.
The Earth trembles,
waves pound against beachside
villages,
resorts, sea cliffs and
retaining walls.
Segregated city is not
natural
it’s exclusion through
redlining
an invisible border
outlining
around our cities, racist
policies
making us outliers
where we remain
hitched to higher interest rates
no rent control and denied
for home loans.
You’re so far from me you
can’t see
I’m human.
You changed the name of the
city
South Central
to “South LA” to erase the
past.
You’re embarrassed by us, so
rewrite
Revisionist, as you know how
to do.
April 29, 1992
people’s guts exploded-
that’s vile.
It wasn’t the first time
marginalized people’s spirit
converged in the streets
either.
New York, Chicago,
Baltimore, Boston
Los Angeles civil unrests cutting
away at pretending that
god, grit and
goodwill will save the hood.
You stood/stand by
and watch us like we’re some
ill-behaved
children who’ve lost our way
and in frustration we throw
a tantrum-
you shake your dayum
head rattling all that
nonsense
in between your ears.
You sigh and reminisce
about your Russian immigrant
grandfather
who arrived here poor as a
pauper
never acted improper, lived
through the worst
time to be poor ever, the Great Depression;
the last time white people
felt empathy for poverty.
waif, wavering, whites with wandering eyes
searching for some hope
plastered across the
headlines #ExtraExtraReadAllAboutIT
Searching for a prayer. Cause
the lord taketh care of.
White helplessness
proliferated the news line.
Whoa! Did she say
proliferated?
Whoa,
she sounds educated!
Circa 2015
I’m sitting above the city
atop Abalone Cove Shoreline
Park: Palos Verdes California
Seaweed
floating
like
the gold flakes
in
a Schnapps bottle.
But
the Pacific is hardly
as
clear as Goldschläger
more
like a sheet of patina
from
where I sit
Palos
Verdes rolling hills
cradled
by rolling waves all the way
fading
into the horizon.
I
can see downtown buildings
cutting
through the smog
mixed
with summer haze
looking
more like a bar graph
than
epic skyline to me.
We
ain't New York but I can go
from
chaparral to sea coast
in
under an hour’s time
just
coasting up the 110 south.
I
first heard of PV in high school
some
classmates commuted from PV
to
go to C.A.M.S[1]
Couldn’t
believe our experimental magnet school
offered
them more than their beachfront property home high school.
But
what did I know, my home high school
couldn't
even front a better education
with
their no resource having, no AP courses providing,
yearly
race-rioting asses.
No
stopping to see waves playfully pushing seaweed
on
our way to our classes.
So
many golden opportunities wasted away
like
human waste discarded into the Pacific.
Our
waters are not clean, shit runs dirty.
It
is so quiet up here, so open no buildings to block
the
view. Did folks up here
see
the dark lines of smoke that day?
The
city was set ablaze, anger, hurt, disrespect
piled
up and burned, baby, burned like garbage.
The
rubbish spewed by those jurors
blew
our communities minds.
Stacey
Koon and his gang walked away free.
He
was judged by a jury of his peers; non-POC,
all
male or females his age, his status, his race.
Not
anyone who could relate to the historical trauma
of
living with unequal protection under the law.
April 29, 1992
our 13 inch black and white
with the pliers-for-dial TV
radiated in color from the
scorching
South Central LA.
Not “FUCK THE POLICE,”
“FUCK ALL YOUR SOCIAL
CONTROL”
all the barriers you place
to keep
your place
ERECT while our world
crumbled.
When
the sirens started
I
didn't see a thing from our
1
bedroom apartment.
Los
Angeles was burning
once
word hit the street
the
streets got mad
hit
back with flames, angry fists and other objects
hurled
at windows and at one another.
Like
billy clubs, steel toe boots
and
245 watts of electricity-
fire
ran through the streets
like
pain through every cell of Mr. King
that
one awful night in ’91.
Rodney
King, a 34 janitor who ran into Mr. Stacy Koon
A
night Mr. Koon was overflowing with rage,
lots
of burning yo’ up in this place.
Yes,
Mr. Koon took out his frustrations
on
an unsuspecting “negrito,”
pobrecito
just another throwaway.
My
HS sweetheart called me
the morning after the verdict
the morning after the verdict
to
make sure I was ok.
LA
was in flames
and
it was spreading to the South Bay.
I
didn't go to school that day,
the
school bus couldn’t
coil
it’s way around the chaos,
the
ferocity of the demonstrators.
People
were taking stuff from stores,
breaking
glass windows, running in fast
and
coming out
faster
despite the weight
they
carried with arms full
but
nothing they took could
fill
the emptiness they felt inside.
Koon
and his gang broke the law
and
got away with it,
communities
break the law
to
get away from it
the
failed system that fails to protect
cause
it’s meant to control.
Rioters
revolt to show they can’t be controlled,
like
fire.
My
city’s streets were empty and barricaded.
Army
jeeps parked at the intersection
of
Compton Blvd. and Artesia to the west
Wilmington
to the east.
Army
vehicles parked,
men
with army colored regalia
and
rifles were perched on our street
alert,
menacing
like
waiting lions.
The
Army National Guard sent in
to
protect us from ourselves.
The
sun hadn’t set but all the kids had to go home.
It
was the rule. A curfew they called it.
A
new rule just for us,
cause
we darkies couldn’t be trusted in the dark.
“Dayum,”
I thought “Our city is already messed up.
We
don’t have any businesses, there’s empty lots everywhere.”
I
was scared of the police, scared of the National Guards,
scared
for and of the people looting,
scared
that the laws were not really there to protect us all.
I
wished with all my might that the looters would go
riot
in Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades,
in
Brentwood and Hollywood Hills.
I
wish rich people would feel the
things
that
our community was feeling.
Wished
that Koon had felt some sympathy,
that
America wasn’t broken,
that
those 4 police officers hadn’t tried to kill Rodney King,
that
Reginald Denny had never been attacked
on
the intersection of Normandie & Florence by those 4 assailants.
I
wished all 8 perpetrators of the violent beatings
where
punished the same
but
the white ones wearing the very, very very dark,
not
black, but blue uniforms got off scot-free.
That guy-
Robert Park
also said
the city is our mirror
it reflects the human
condition.
Walt Disney Concert Hall’s
shine is only a interference
in our perspective
encandilados, with the panels
warping our realities.
The city is a state of mind,
right now it seems
like lust is on the mind,
for power, terrain
for money for the ‘cause I
said so…” of it.
the city is our mirror
it reflects the human
condition.
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