BUSHWICK DIARIES, 1

Just as the day’s sun shuts her eye for bed,
An entwined puff of three nimbus clouds
Bellies out from the iron-lung
Of an ankle-monitored juvenile.

The kid maneuvers like a squirrel then more like a fly
Oompa Loompa as he tosses his blunt to the fall leaves
On a Bushwick ballcourt, hearing a drone pass over by.

Off Irving & Starr, from his back left pocket, you can read
The starched red color flapping for a title: the wild-west
Bandana of non compos mentis.
In other wor(l)ds, the Willy Wonka of street genius,

But a bit batshit–seeing how he’s travelling light,
Not with a Boy Scout’s white-picketed knife,
But a more svbtle pencil-sharpened icepick.

This after finishing his chore of burying a Glock
Somewhere in the backyard to his Grandmother’s house.
(Well, something like that.) Soon he’ll be heading for post
At a Knickerbocker laundromat. To pick up ‘the mail’ and wash

Some bills for a boss we’ll just have to keep hush if not dub
A real-world King Koopa in a kingdom of cheap easter-egg traps
Where there’s no use playing Super Mario, of saving the princess,

Noting how her pink plumbing remains beyond being wrenched–
A fact for which she’s in habit of using an otherworldly fentanyl mix
That each morning she sprinkles over her Special K cereal.

But such is life when you’re born past a certain stop,
When before being bussed to school
You are fed left over Easter egg candy dusted
With horse tranquilizer.

She remembers how she first stepped into Hell’s classroom,
Hell’s cafeteria; she remembers the smell of urine,
The dried brown tear of black tar

That once ran down
Her first period wall
At some point,
To a stop.