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Reply to "My own private East Village"

It is a person's mind turned into a studio efficiency apartment on Avenue C. !
Complete with view of some incidental civil unrest down the block.

I forgot to add a Yoruba proverb I hear people in the neighborhood share:
"The people who SAY they are teaching you to be tall are the same people who are teaching you to be small."

But since this is My Own Private East Village nothing here has to make sense to anybody else.
Not the old woman who has been living in the cracks too long who gets God Stuff from things too simple for you to notice -don't step on that candy wrapper, rare as a blind pigeon.
Not the Pentacostal girls who wear dowdy sack dresses but paint their faces like Celia Cruz. Not the virgins with closed eyes who, in white dresses, are led through the streets by old women laughing at the men.
Not the three year old asking, "Can you run from B to Clinton and beat the cars on Houston?"
Not the landlady who climbs five flights of stairs to knock on your door, flash her .38, and tell you that as far as the rent goes the building owner in Jackson State Prison, Detroit, wants CASH.
Not the one person you finally reach on the phone, after calling ten different people, who tells you it feels like their head is going to explode so they can't talk now.
Not the 386 Hydra Shok hollow point Plus-P that bounced off a twelfth rib, jellied a liver, and is caught in the corner of the Corona Girl's smile pasted up on a bodega door.
Not the firemen who are down the block dowsing a smoldering mattress while they help themselves to the teevee, camera, and jar of pennies.
Not the one-armed 15-year-old who finds it easy to get in to the building front hall to catch a little sleep thereby showing you how a formerly right-handed youth can teach you how to get something simple and available as a dream while the building complaint inspecter you called claims he is not able to locate your building on the block.
Not the sad face drawn on the bank clock.
Not Bimbo Rivas' daughter in whose dark eyes the notes of songs resist their intervals of silence to respond to Loisaida with the valiant continuation of the life of her father.
Not the ghost of Lucky Cien Fuegos softly singing, "Mi casa esta en la Avenida C, yo nunca espero oir de ti otra vez."
Not any of that.
Last edited by seven
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