An Ode to DC

The blossoms bloomed again!

Glowing full white

A gift to the clouds

Inspiring the peace and presence of a happy baby

To those two leggeds walking beneath.

The next day the winds ripped each pedal into the sky.

They flew like a butterfly wing.

Whirled and dizzied

like the tourists taking pictures,

Hungry to feel her,

freezing her instead.

As the frost froze the rest the next day.

Falling out of a chinese tour bus

On 17th and Pennsylvania,

Looking this way and that with his golden trimmed sunglasses,

Eyes looking for that house of the white american dream. The empty promise.

Where was is it? He asked.

As sirens tore through the air.

To call it the best and worst of worlds

Would simplify the beauty and the terror.

They curl up at night

Right outside the door

Of the luxury furniture store

Whose plush leather sofas

And deep mahogany shelves

Stay softly lit all night on U st.

They’re wrapped in grey bespeckled blanket

Made of dryer lint and egg cartons it seems.

One inch of glass separates

But the chasm between is so much thicker.

We start the day singing “abiyoyo” together

In the all black Southeast preK classroom.

Two girls, with sparkly double-beaded ties in

Their carefully braided natural hair, fight

At the cash register, in the marketplace station.

“But there are so many fruits and vegetables to eat over there” I say

“But she took my money!” “No! Its my money”

I’m on the late night express bus, rolling past all the towers

Rising up at the wharf, 70 years after 23,000 black homes

were demolished to clean up the city

There is a wage slave nodding off beside me,

Another day older, and deeper in debt.

Her breasts are almost unrecognizable,

torn and pummeled, since her children became piranhas.

Oh! but look at how she dances.

Whirling pedals, undulating waves.

Locks of her mangled hair strewn about on curbs.

Sliced ear lobes from heavy earings in too long.

Reagan National Airport, on top of the old slave plantation,

on top of indigenous people’s summerlands.

People sing in the sanctuary of her heart

then, pumped out to oxygenate the extremity.

Look at how she dances to the hearts melody.

Life yet lives! That, can only inspire.

But her body is wracked in empire.

It looks pretty in DC,

If you are willing to flee reality.

These monuments of war and money

are the very stones we will use to build from

When the fierce urgency of now bekons us to freedom.

We, are all the brave people, that can’t flee from it.

That sink into our world and become it.