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.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Poem for Display in a City Bus
- Poem for Display in a Subway Car
- Poem for Display at a City Reservoir
- Poem for Display in a Veterans’ Memorial Park
- Poem for Display in a Public Library
- Poem for Display in a Hospital Waiting Room
- Poem for Display in a Municipal Building
- Poem for Display in an Abandoned Factory
- Poem for Display in an Inaccessible Location
- Poem for Display at a Police Checkpoint
- Poem for Display Above the Urinals in a Men’s Restroom
- Poem for Display in a Vacant Lot
- Poem for Display in a Shopping Mall Food Court
- Poem for Display in a Housing Project
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.
I don’t know Dave, the projects here aren’t so safe from projectiles.
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.
This one really needs to be posted as the title suggests. Kind of like a cornerstone in this case.