you get used to how things are soon learn poverty
makes prisoners of us all
that the infinity of your world is a window
you are told repeatedly to come away from
for it isn’t safe
learn even more quickly a bullet doesn’t have a name how it
almost seems to enjoy settling hard upon the other side of its point
when you are young impressionable and too curious
you simply must know what is on the other side of your
small protected part of the universe
the place that isn’t much safer
but you learn work hard at pretend become fluent in not–hearing
as the adults of your world constantly come for each other
even when they do not mean to
or want to
with time you comprehend they have no understanding of why
memory conjures up such a battle-ready kind of anguish
for them there is no answer for empty wallets no balm for bruised childhoods
the stillwiththem of what it means to walk nay shuffle through the school day
newspapers plugging holes in their shoes after having survived another night
of a hungry belly muffled-out by the dull music from a neighbor’s apartment
only to make it through to the next day the next shuffling of feet fearing
the return home the running past that neighbor’s apartment
the man who is surely unsafe
they moved it seemed if my childhood ears heard correctly
from one catastrophe to the next the muffling the shuffling the running
and when this cycle had been perfected they learned still more
about the upending of eviction the indoors becoming out-of-doors
my curiosity therefore about the other side of windows read hollow
to the adults who reared me in the small home holding too many black bodies
to them my hopeful gazing was a borrowing of trouble
brought them nothing but more worry a cause for additional concern
and a quick sudden kind of shame
why couldn’t I see the threadbareness of life why refuse to acknowledge
its fraying edge or come to understand that dodging adult bodies
hurling themselves at each other was an immediate declaration of war
and didn’t I know that the battlefield was as indoors as my out-of-doors
and of course I did
would see my first dead body by age nine watching from my window as he lay for hours
on the playground asphalt surrounded by police tape its yellow whipped by the cooling air
knew what it meant to ride darkened elevators straddling human excrement understood
that girls and women where occasionally taken from equally darkened stairwells
when the elevators were intentionally disabled from their designated work
but I could not help myself for there was the window a precious pane of glass
a doorway a universe
where an elderly man raised and rested his pigeons on a rooftop
there he fed them stroked them and it seemed knew them by name
each day he flew them in amazing patterns and they were free
no matter the weather or dismal circumstance
and each time at the end of their day at the end of their work
their grand ghetto performance concluded
they returned to him with the safety
of never having to know the muffling shuffling running
their indoors becoming out-of-doors
and to my childhood eyes they shared with him the news of the day
and so I learned in this way to expect freedom the eventualness of it
craving beyond the sing-songing of bullets the muffling shuffling running
the perpetualness of generational indoors becoming out-of-doors
to ignore if for a short time the fraying edge
learned how to look beyond the flailing bodies
the concerned eyes at my hopefulness
understood that I would one day move beyond this
the dark side of my immediate moon returning to it one day
with a grateful news about what lies beyond