Restlessly propelled bus tour through poverty's playpen
Inhaling the vile stench of minimum wage and food-stamps
An unholy concoction of $8/hr in a $960 cramped studio apartment fed by cal fresh's moldy government cheese
You can't see your reflection in these dark waters

Poor packed blacks on boats
But these ones float
Above neglected concrete
Journeying through the flatlands
Where row house windows bear constricting iron bars and beat with the melodic music of despair like imprisoned hearts

(Tattooed reflections display poverty like full screen settings on flat screen TVs
Rolling over restless seas
roiling with potholes like whirlpools  where crackheads are caught in the undertow) - I DIDN'T PERFORM HIS PART AT FINALS

The block conductor at the head of the snake
Piloting us to overcrowded buildings, clogged ventricles, new Virginias and  street corners

The girl next to me
Blackberry skin
Hair more plastic than the bus seat snacking on hot Cheetos and guzzling a Pepsi
She's Loud
Claps hands
Smacks lips
I want to help her
She's confused
Swallowing manufactured poison
trying to glimpse her face in troubled lakes

 A man
slumped drunk across the aisle
Moaning with the ghosts of the city's lost sons
Immersed in a pool of toxic regrets
Stirring up the will to drown
Wailing his throat-gauging sorrows like a banshee to transparent deities
refusing to let them drown with him he holds them aloft
Buoys them on bent head
swims with a cigarette
two drags like white flags
float above him
Surrendering to his closeted demons

In the shadows
Black boys relapse to times when the back of the bus
and the bottom of the ship
were home
Engraving their names into the metallic flesh of this death trap
Hoping to be remembered
Littering pieces of themselves onto buses that last longer than their bones so they won't be forgotten future generations will know… we sank here

I sit
silent in the crows nest of a mad sanctuary
Etching my thoughts onto a crinkled brown paper bag
Documenting demise
My people
Not my direction
Torn between plummet and survival
There is a piece of me
 in the confused girl consuming her poison
In the lost husk of a man
Adrift in lonely waters
Scripted onto the bleeding echoing walls of a wrecked ship

Born into consciousness
Surrounded by a violent, leeching ignorance
How far have we really come
When we live like slaves to our own misfortune
When we search for salvation in the shadowed irises of our oppressor
We're so backwards that we've been engineered to oppress ourselves
We rob our own communities in mobs of hopeless heathens
Were is this progress you flaunt like a new coat of ebony flesh
There is no happy ending
This line ends at 107 and Mac
Where black and brown boys reach the end of the line at the barrel of a Mac 11
Where they pave concrete over our wandering souls
Hardly a promise land
But ironically the land we were promised