This is the City

Dani
Lifeline
Published in
6 min readSep 27, 2021

A spoken word poem

Alice Pasqual | Unsplash

This… is the city.
Yeah,
I know it’s got problems,
ones that can’t be solved by
wearing condoms.
We insulate, but the
cold hard facts infiltrate — and it makes us
hate ourselves while we contemplate the bedeviled shelves of history…
A history that is a mystery by design
to keep us
blind.

Well let me tell you mine.

If I could shine a light down on the ground,
the first thing you’d see is concrete and feet
moving to a beat that sounds like
me.
Like rap, trap, and hip hop, this city
smacks across my favorite tracks, while I
walk along these beats of popped and scattered cracks.
These tatted paths of
murals and graffiti
keep me close to the family that
sees and needs me to remember the embers of a past I feed on
to survive…
if you believe me.

Yet,
what you see is not just
me in this tree of life we call the streets — but a
sea of life that circles in strife and acts like water we breathe
to simply… be.

It’s a
harmony of cars and lights you see — a
part of me that stays within arm’s reach of the
sights I need to create
a collective
identity.

The homes come next in this text, with my
brothers and sisters caught in the hex of split sexes —
the mother and the mister — my father that dissed her —
first with words that blister,
then hands that sometimes missed her
and found my sister hiding behind couches with a wish to…
keep brothers safe
through songs and sweet whispers.

Then the divorce, of course, with a
discourse of blame, shame, and condemnation — the
alienation of my
declarations as a plaintiff
that breads a nation of hatred in these streets we all should be calling
sacred.

Yeah I grew up like a statement:
standing in blatant disregard of the statesmen that made me see him.
I threw up street signs with the homies —
smoked stogies with OG’s —
told cops to blow me.
I kicked rocks —
broke jaws with shock tops and boxed fools up all over the city of hard knocks.
Each day, I fought bars to show that I existed —
to declare that my name was listed in the scrolls of this
twisted existence…

But then Sarah died…
It was heroin.
Her lost life went down to the
marrow in bones so cold they’d forgotten how to
feel.
This shit was real.
But before we had time to kneel,
life came barrelin’ and the heroin took two more —
the pair of ’em with needles of steel.
Wedo got boxed up.
Helen got knocked up.
Jeremy, Matt, and Rachel packed boxes so they wouldn’t get
locked up.
And there I was:
peeling dirty socks and dead skin off next to the glove box of the
car I was left with.
The skin looked like…dead pith from the
boots they were kept in.
Living in my car, I was
hustlin’ so hard I had slept in ‘em.

This is the city.
This is…my city.
Still got the kinks from sleepin in the passenger seat.
Still wake with the
shakes sometimes at the sound of a voice outside my window, like the
cops who knocked at three o’clock —
demanding with reasons unknown to search my home…

This flow’s got me low.
It’s breaking down slowly into unholy waters.
There’s no
honors in drinking the hatred of my
father.
Time to change this cup of tea; it’s lost all sanctity —
There has got to be
another way
for me.

Let’s take a ride in time through this
city of mine.
Get on the freeway and drive sky-high, where I
stared and I cried
as I tried to find my guide.
It was hard to
hide the parts of myself that brought
shame inside —
those things that didn’t align with the
kind of life that shines down from… steeples.

See I
spoke with those people who stand in cathedrals;
they said God was here to
save me from my
evils — that
Jesus would
heal us if we
kneel hushed in the reverence of his just hands
and understand that he
was a perfect man who loved his children…
even if it
killed him.

They said that I was
filled with sin —
that I could be…whole again.
They said, they said,
They said that I was broken…
that it was a
token of my humanity
and I could only be awoken by forsaking my vanity
and accepting that I would be sent
to repent
forever…
But that was insanity.
I spent years raking over the calamities of the
man you see
before I could believe that I should be whole!
without the need for Thee to bless my soul.

So,
bye bye to stain glass windows, while I
drive by these lame ass symbols of a
time spent choking on smoke — like endo — with a
hope that those who could show me the ropes would crescendo on a
life that was in the throes of straight limbo.

So I turned to a
highway that said
“my way”
and I left the byways of religiosity for a new place
with philosophy
and books I could read —
a place that could
possibly make sense of the odds I would see in a world filled with hypocrisy.
It was time to turn these
notions in me towards verses and words catalogued in the halls of libraries —
the oceans of the city,
contained on a road called university.

The irony of that place, indeed, is that those damn words blinded me
with an avalanche of theses and rhetorical feces.
My mind was blanched as each scholarly branch lanced at the mores from the
core of my humanity.

It was, of course, a necessary, but
forceful, recourse —
taken to ensure the pure maturity of an individual vexed by the complexities
of post-modernity.

I was to be sent away from that place, they say —
with a capacity to sway from day to day into each and every one
of Plato’s caves.
But like a kite that yearns to fly free in the city —
despite the violent churning of winds discerning —
I crashed and I burned
in a world that never
stops
turning.
Reality was hurting me
as I got used to these new lenses now burned in deep.
And my eyes cried
as all beneath the sky pulled away like the
tides…
hiding their secrets in layers of truth,
confined
to the minds of their respective
kind.

In time,
I would find within me the designs I needed to stabilize my mind.
I had to accept that
these streets are not defined rationally but with a capacity to shift and change in mangy ways that moved irrationally to stay the same, even as they
fade away.
Like Tom, from the
Glass Menagerie, I descended from the fire escapes of my
past with speed,
travelling around a great deal oversees —
attempting to find in motion the taste of spaces that surrounded me.
And with a profound sense of humility… it was the
city itself that touched down in me
as I acknowledged my own fallibility.

And now I am bound to explore this
city that resounds in me at the edges
of my own curiosity —
to embrace this mosaic of spaces
that leaves me in the good graces of so many different faces;
this! is the city I was raised with, and it’s a place
I hope to remain in.

[A Brief but IMPORTANT Note: This is a spoken word poem. It is meant to be said aloud. Punctuation and line breaks are like musical notations for me. It is not a perfect system, and I break my own rules sometimes (both grammatically and stylistically).

And if you’ve made it this far, I thank you! I hope you enjoy my poem!!

--

--

Dani
Lifeline

I was in a deep slumber of creative silence, but dreams have birthed forests inside me now. And like the sun rising over snowcapped mountains, I have awoken!