Barrio Journal East L.A.: Living the Recession

Cigarette butts make unusual mosaics in the so-called lawn of the heavily policed park on Mr. Wilshire’s boulevard. Gringo kings talk about breeder reactors and beget ribbons of fear in los vatos of the City of Angels. A footloose muchacho throws his paper plane past billboards of powdered white pudenda admired by hairless blue blonde never-never-land boys wrestling in surviving dandelions. Across the loud street of modern spirituals lowriders drag their jailed pain screeching past lonely Joe’s t.v. repair shop. Booty commercials flash upside down in the smog streaked neon window.

Brown buffalos get English in workaday schools a meaningful tattoo of unforgiving blood if they’re lucky. Bullets curse barrio poets who eat them like dulces then spit out histories of pain.

After days of acid rain the lost sun comes promising heaven sent birds of brown children voices. In a vacant lot a muchacho floats at the happy end of his 99¢ store kite.

By corporate t.v. light media teens hookup skin deep with commercial sex & manufactured want. Blood gray light glistens like fool’s gold off polyester suits and pale skinned corridor serfs hurry-hurrying in a mechanical vein into glassed-in towers of greed.

The smog heavy sunset spreads volumes of heated beauty dappling skyscrapers overhanging freeway bound money makers on their sincere way to waiting sighs at night shift home. Corporate mouths spit on the unmarked graves of limbless Iraqis and “illegal” workers with U.S. steel knives inside presidential bullshit for lower class help.

Honking drivers shoot me the finger, gonna mess with us: living the graffiti.

Colored skin gets slave children beaten innocent souls on the blue streets of American pie.

Ramon sings for his supper sleeps with fleas in the manicured bushes next to the 5 * hotel

Knocked down by skid row all you want is cardboard sleep a clear night drunken stars.

After hot weeks picking shoveling sleeping in junkyard cars nos hermanos cross the imaginary border to their tossed away lives.

Mall teens pretend they’re objects of desire & with plastic spend so they can become it.

But for fortune homeless rise in the moist sunrise from their sleeping ditches & hunt for a place to shit.

Stray bullets take the innocent hermanas of the street their brothers’ hate heaped each upon their other.

Florencio is an unfortunate citizen of the corporate needle a dumpster friend of alley leftovers ignored daily by macho headlines of little dick wars. He sleeps in the arms of those who will look for love until they let him go.

The all night winos stare at the trashcan fire warming their gave you hearts.

Fake tits mean tattoos do me girls drink vintage wine brag about their club lovers.

Begging for work or change Rosa screams at the sky about children she aborted.

Singing spirituals for his supper Arturo gives me much more than the silver dollar I spare him.