Beach Ave.

Love lost

Hope gone

Death Shrines on every corner,

After a while they all start to blur and look the same.

 

I grew up on the corner of Beach Ave,

I went to sleep to the sound of gunshots

That sometimes woke me in the middle of the night

The air was polluted with the smells of

Gasoline, sulfur, cigarettes, and Marijuana

The friend that I made the day before,

Died in a puddle of blood,

Shot in the head on the corner of Beach Ave.

 

I walked past the rust colored pavement

Everyday
For months

Until the rain, sleet, and snow

Washed it away.

The next week,

I saw the news,

Another person dead on the on the street

Gunshot victim,

Bullet to the Abdomen

Another Body

Another shrine

All on Beach Ave

All on my street.

 

Some nights I lie awake and wonder

Of all the gunshots I hear

How many shrines will I see

When the sun comes up?

How many news reports would pretend to care

About the dead kids?

Gone because of gang violence

All because they couldn’t escape the streets.

I remember a guy I liked who lived

On the street right behind mine

I was young,

Barely ten years old

We met up at the park every day.

And one day he didn’t show up.

Every day I went

And every day he failed to show up.

This went on for about a week.

I was too scared to watch the news.

But I didn’t have to.

There was a shrine

Right on the corner of Beach Ave.

This city fueled us with venom,

Feeding us with poison

City of Lights

But this city never shed its light on us.

All we got was empty new reports

And scared tenants

Too broke to move out of the hood

And too broke for a funeral

So they put up shrines

And lit candles and sang sad songs,

Strung up pictures of their loved one

And sent prayers upward

Pleading with God to protect their baby

Who had died so young

On the corner of Beach Ave

The city of lights never looked back on us,

To clean up the gang violence

We lived 5 blocks from a police station,

So why would it take nearing an hour

Before they got here

Thanksgiving of ‘06 I witnessed a mugging

On the corner of Beach Ave

All the while wondering

Why are you stealing on the holiday of giving?

 

After years living in this dark place,

Where the City of Lights didn’t even bother

To shed the light inside of her

You get used to seeing blood everywhere.

You get used to seeing knife fights

And hearing gun wars in the middle of the night

You get used to seeing the crap

That we made of this block

And this becomes the norm.

 

You get used to seeing the hatred

The broken liquor bottles on the street,

The blood on the street signs

The vicious dogs that almost killed me

When I was almost nine

The fresh spot of blood that wasn’t there the night before

All on the corner of 1534 Beach Ave