Asphalt People
I
Los Angeles doesn’t spare
a chance to see the spectacle
Asphalt people
darkened skin with grime & abandonment
swollen ankles oozing despair
eyes lost in the misery of this urban horror
66 thousand faces of displacement
Couch surfing or gym memberships to personal hygiene
Ghosts of nocturnal rapes run naked on San Pedro & 17th
Twin Towers asylum
Like refugees in the South American Andes
Asphalt people push their shopping carts
loaded with disappointments & helplessness
Only there are no border crossings into hope
Asphalt people - refugees in their own land
No TPS out of this nightmare
It takes a special kind of grit
to not hear voices / Angry voices wanting the end
This schizophrenia of contradictions
Bugatti riding past homeless encampments
The delusion of democracy
The dissociation of an economy built on free labor
The psychosis of using 400-year-old strategies
To keep
People of color women physically & mentally disabled seniors & transwomen
unhoused & excluded from the benefits of privilege
unbalanced & medicated
worst yet intoxicated
by the venom poured onto this concrete reality
Fentanyl & alcohol
II
Souls pawned to banks
for a chance to live on borrowed safety
mortgages outliving occupants
Woman screams
“ungrateful” to my face
for not praising her god
How dare an immigrant have what she hasn’t achieved
as a white American woman in her lifetime?
For displaced immigrants
The expectation is to stay on the ground
paying rent punctually
When an individual suffering from mental disorders
pulls herself together and claws her way out
they call her privileged sanction her
III
Displacement by gentrification
Property flipped on the side of exploitation
young unmyelinated people calling themselves Pilgrims
Gentrification doesn’t happen without official complicity
IV
They prefer to walk over or around
schizophrenic unhoused neighbors on Figueroa
glue their fragmentation with antipsychotics
They don’t need no medication
They don’t need no mind control
treatment hides in meaningful work and decent pay
A paycheck at the end of the month
feels mighty good &
doesn’t have side effects
permanent housing
cleanses the asphalt
