Poem for Display in a Housing Project

This entry is part 14 of 14 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

4 Replies to “Poem for Display in a Housing Project”

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

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