On the streets where i grew up
There were no high buildings
Lots of store front churches and liquor stores
Little brown girls in catholic school uniforms
Climbing in overfilled dusty loud buses
Boys playing basketball behind barbwire courts
Babies crying in the scorching summer sun
Oh yeah, we had a bunch of barbecues
Soul music in all variations blasting from open windows
Baseball games, basketball, jump rope, card games
street dancing, singing, cussin’ and praisin’ the lord
The smell of roast and frying chicken on Sundays
Guys hanging out in front of sagging dilapidated doors
You might find an old used needle or two or three
Stuck sadly under a pair of worn rusty swings
And the playgrounds usually had more than just kids
On certain street blocks in my community
You weren’t allowed to walk through
Not if you didn’t belong there
Unless you had family living on it
Violence, oh we had that on many corners
Sometimes the dim lamplights shone the blood
Of the last misunderstanding between two men
Or men and cops or even between men and women
Almost everybody I knew had a gun or a rifle
Some had baseball bats at every door entrance
We had sanctified preachers in almost every family
Cops, doctors, teachers, junkies, army folk, drunks
Girls dressed like women and boys posing as men
Some houses had well-kept lawns watched by german shephards
While others had basically nothing but a sagging roof and the smell of piss
Lots of nosy police cars prolling the streets looking for eyesores
Some didn’t even need an excuse to pull out a club, handcuffs, or a gun
The parks were often full of the sound of percussion beats
Revolutionists arguing about how to overthrow the missing system
Or the strong smell of ganja enveloping a group of teenagers
Shell shocked ex. soldiers sleeping on empty benches
Evicted homeless looking for warm dry shelter
Families living in cars unable to pay the exorbitant rent
Ghurch ladies spent a lot of time getting home most evenings
And the noise from the clubs never seemed to stop
Life wasn’t easy on the block, but it wasn’t boring either
Camille Elaine Thomas
March 02, 2022
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