gangs?

my whole life i heard "soo-woo" out my window

it was something i didn’t know

but it was frequent, like the crow calls

from birds perched outside my home

men pitched it high and low

so i started calling too

out my humble dyckman abode

something "birds" surely do

didn’t know what a gang was, 

but i sure knew what they do

scare, murk and kill niggas

even for a two by two

but no one taught me the difference

between family and a gang

so in my notebooks i scrachted in “ABT”

said it’s cause that’s my sister’s dad

not affiliated with ANY gangs. I'm reflecting on how i would hear soowoo so often, every man's call distinct. it began to sound like a song, something birds do on perched trees as they call after each other. i mention crows because i heard them a lot outside my window when i lived in Ellwood st.

i moved out of dyckman when i was 13, i never learned that soowoo was affiliated with a gang until much later.

"abt"= all about thayer. i didnt know it was a "gang", i just thought it was a trendy graffiti thing, so i grafittied my own notebooks because my sister's dad is from thayer, just a few blocks away from me.


if you google "abt graffiti thayer" portraits  of Abbott Handerson Thayer come up , lolololol 
google searches are so eurocentric, gtfoooo

How to Succeed in Poverty Without Really Trying (published in CONTRARIWISE)

Why would anyone choose to work and pay for an apartment, especially in larger cities like New York. You can lead a middle-class lifestyle just as easily if you’re dirt poor. You know, the kind of poor where your mattress is a bench on Central Park and your salad consists of the fallen leaves from the trees with their own special salad dressing: dog pee and dirt in place of poppy seeds, vinegar and oil.

Why do poor people struggle so much when they literally get things handed to them? Granted, they are handed to them not on a silver platter, but rather on a tray of pity and reluctance (or compassion). Poor people have the world in their hands! No, literally, they have the planet Earth in their hands as they desperately grab onto the grass.

In this piece I offer you a concise, to-the-point explanation of how to succeed in poverty without really trying, a sequel to Broadway’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (Mind you, that reference eludes me, as I don’t even know what the musical is about, but the title is relevant, so let’s just be one of those people, you know, the ones who use stark references to seem like they know what they’re talking about).