Explore Poems: Cities & Urban Life

seven hills beckon
the sun to a dance. two steps
forward, another to the left. kongas powder

their …

"A car" "awash with blood" "Blood at our feet" "& I
& others" "have small springs" "of blood from our…

Morning in the city and the performance
that is Madison Avenue wearing diamond
studs for breakfast, my…

All the second-gen immigrant Berkeley moms somehow all
went to Stanford. I’m laughing because
I want to…

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where …

Why do people always choose saturdays
to wig out
I mean the ones who scream leave me alone
i hate your…

i am new york city
here is my brain of hot sauce
my tobacco teeth my
     mattress of  bedbug tongue
legs…

The city lies back in its winding-sheet
While little digits drum a steady beat

On roofs and terraces, …

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the…

I had taken him to his mother
and was returning along the D8.
In the breakdown lane several cars, and …

& Memphis is out in Full Fang!
Skeletons skip down our pitted streets.
Whole families with matching hobo stipple
roam tragicomically through the sprawling
candy deserts: polka-dot bandanas
on sticks, flapping Chaplinesque shoes.

Unclaimed pumpkins pile high
behind razor wire. The air's thick
with caw & trouble. Our...

When relatives came from out of town,
we would drive down to Blackbottom,
drive slowly down the congested…

We sat in the narrow plaza filled
with metal tables by the construction site.
It was warm, around 5 pm, one of those
evenings after a long winter where
the city seemed to be anxiously flowering.
Several acquaintances rode by on bicycles.
There was a line...

It was the prophets and the seers, they were the ones
who anointed my city holy—Kingston of dust and stone,
Kingston haunted by the ghosts loitering in the pens,
the enslaved...

dort, wo die stadt versickert,
beim bahndamm, jenseits der in ihrer pracht
erstarrten, riesigen zikade
des umspannwerkes, siehst du sie: gebraucht,
getürmt, ein ganzes feld, gezackt
oder gewellt die maserung in jedem bauch

und dunkler als sämtliche rembrandts
zusammen: gummiakropolis,
heiligtum des banalen—im herbst berennt es
der sturm, erduldet...

where the city starts to come undone,
at the railroad embankment, beyond the staunch
colossal cicada of the substation
in its splendor, you start to notice:
used up, towering, a field of them, worn
or rippled texture in each paunch

and smokier than all the rembrandts
put...

Crip (noun): slang for a disabled person/the whole of
     the disabled community/
a school of thought
Example: “I’m on crip time” 
Meaning: Time bends differently when the universe that is
     my body dictates it 

Crip (noun): a Black gang that originated in...

On the opposite platform, the Mother.
Her back turned, a grey shearling
coat down to her calves. Her head
tilted to read the map, her face reflected
over the coloured lines that cross
and cross it, like a toddler’s scribble drawing.
How can the Mother be...

In Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying
everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.
It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.

Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers
in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.

There will never...