Poem for Display in Housing Project

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Public Poems

Memo to the original planners:
this is what the future
actually looks like.
How do you explain
to yourselves our vagrant,
flagrant refusal to fit
into your uniformed vision?
Or perhaps we fit all too well,
making this project
into an efficient projection
of someone’s self-loathing
onto the cosmos?
For surely these highrises
amount to another Babel.
Some aspect of their conception
disrespected the natural order,
& now they are as hollow
as spent shells.
And just as in scripture,
we barely understand
the lingo of our own
flown children,
who say — we think –
that the prison feels like home,
that it has a yard,
that they might be
a little safer there
from stray
projectiles.

Series Navigation← Poem for Display in a Shopping Mall Food Court

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
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4 Responses to Poem for Display in Housing Project

  1. Dave says:
    August 28, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    It’s probably obvious from this that I don’t have much experience with housing projects (just as I haven’t spent much time in shopping mall food courts). FWIW I regard the poems in this series as place-holders of a sort, in case I ever motivate to engage in some real research and make a book of it.

  2. Laura says:
    August 29, 2008 at 10:59 pm

    I don’t know Dave, the projects here aren’t so safe from projectiles.

  3. Dave says:
    August 30, 2008 at 7:25 am

    Laura, that statement was about prisons, the extent to which they may actually seem like a refuge of sorts to those from extremely violent neighborhoods.

  4. Peter says:
    August 31, 2008 at 12:12 am

    This one really needs to be posted as the title suggests. Kind of like a cornerstone in this case.