Stairwells (Poetry/ Story Format)

I did a search on the top seven projects in the united states of America and started reading. After reading several articles this is what I created from it. Read an understand why I label it political

Why is my hood

Considered so different?

Why do you consider it a project

Under development?

My address should not be synonymous

With inner-city blight and crime

Or poverty like we don't shine.

Like this is the place that

My dreams have come to rest

Have come to die!

Oh no not I!

Minoru Yamasaki

Did you envision my little brothers and sisters

Being outlined in chalk lines and fading with gun smoke?

Did you imagine the fear in our faces as we were provoked

Running and racing

Between the stair wells!

Here! Just take it!

Take what little I have in my pockets!

I don't want to think about my mother sitting crying

Wondering, overcome with grief.

Wondering if another one of her children will be absent

From the dinner table because of

Skip - Stop elevators...

Praying,

“Please get me as close as you can.

All I want is a hot plate and a slice of corn bread.”

Pruitt Igoe…….Pruitt Igoe

They break down these walls

But the memories stand still.

Demolish, demolished,

Yet and still

I am a Queen.

Unit 3124

Address of an ebony blessing

With sensual measurements

Coke bottle curves for days

With a smile brighter than your Y shaped

Sunlight views

With a caramel complexion and Hershey dimples.

I was beautiful!

A young queen looking for the answer to her dreams,

I was in need of my Nas or Mobb Deep…

He would take me away from these poverty stricken streets

And not leave me here

Watching the clock escape into the abyss of my inevitable demise

Watch my eyes

Set on old age

In these Queens bridges housing projects.

I’m still here.

I’m aging less than gracefully

As a member of the dream team

I knew I wasn’t dreaming

When

I heard gun shots outside my doors frame.

Frame of mind,

“Why the police want to bother with me for?”

Told them “I don’t know nothing about nothing!

So get the hell on!”

As I stood looking through my peep hole

Half a pound of this and a few hundred stacks in my used sofas

Mad because a sister got a little cushion for herself.

Pow Pow Pow

Bang Bang Bang

I hear them outside my door

As I take three steps away

They can try all they want

But they are not getting through this door!

I don’t care how hard they keep pushing.

Yelling,

“Push and shoot some more!!

As I fall to the floor…

Lungs filled up with blood

Air filled with

Kush…Smoke….Queens, NY….

Smoke, Queens, NY…..

 

Smoking with a shy chic

Said her name was Cheyenne.

Said she was from the windy city,

Said I want to go one day.

(Want to leave this place)

Said you don’t want go via my way…

She said 24/7 ---- 2416

Unit 2416

24 buildings with at least 16 stories

High rises filled with everything

Down to low life prostitutes and pimps

 

Sounded like she was running numbers

The way she was fumbling

Struggling to tell me her life's story. 

Robert Taylor homes

Had become her throne by birth,

Her gift her curse.

She was a playground legend.

“People used to say you know

Your father taught you better”

Barely in the picture,

But it was better than never meeting him.

Hard life left her reaping thugs lives.

This chic was grim with a deeper sorrow than tomorrow could contain.

Told her I don’t want hear it

Leave tomorrow where it started

And pass the blunt this way.

She was killing me high

I still don’t see why

Or what brought you via way of Chicago

To

Jordan Downs, Watts California.

But I’m telling you now,

You were better off where you came from.

This place looks like WWII hit home.

If you gone be in these streets

You gone have to watch your back for the police.

Don’t know whose brutality is worse

Po’ Po’s or the couple who stays next door,

Or what about the Watts riots and gang violence

We go hard like Magnolia Projects…

Projects…Projects…Projects…

 

Like GODs most masterful project

I bloom in a dark room

Surrounded by what the world perceives to be

A mountain of just ignorance

Pushed in to buildings that need condemning

Like the many people and their sins…

I am not in a position to judge those

Who find themselves feeling like their value is

Less than a magnolia flower

Pop open another condom

Before you open your mouth around here

With your comments

Safety first

She took off the safety

And the results were you lying on your back in the dirt.

Ashes to ashes

From Central city to your city

Trying to get an education and hoping it means you will amount to something

Don’t dispute this!

Or consider my words useless

The youth here

Chant “we want to live long but half of us are dead and gone

The rest of us will be dead by dawn and that’s no joke”

Death in more than just the physical sense

But since the death rates keep on climbing

I’m gone keep on grinding

Like a Juvenile delinquent does best.

Pop in a Jay- Z album just to drown out the shootings.

 

Trying to get an empire state of mind

In unit 1705

Where’s that at?

Marcy’s you idiot!

Get mad but need to gone and wipe your face

Pushing off hoes and crack heads

Willing to do anything just to get a taste

If you ain’t trapping you stay laced,

If you stay laced you stay packing,

If you ain’t packing a vest then

You gone be the next

Getting laid to rest,

Praying to Saint Francis

Hoping he comes in with the assist.

 

Could have been a basketball legend

Hoop dreams kept me from being hooped in

With the ones my momma kept calling hooligans.

Stay away from any type of hallucinogens.  

Might smoke a few trees up in Cabrini Green

3607 unit stayed lit up

Put a towel under the door like my mom

Didn’t know what was up.

Up until the age of fifteen she used to walk me to school

A virtual war zone

Looking my mother in her eyes like whose going to protect you?

Say that not to disrespect you

But with my home boys getting gunned down on their way to school

And there little sisters getting sexually assaulted, left for dead in stairwells.

I get scared and worried about you!

2010 came too late for some and too soon for you

R.I.P to the victims of these streets.

 

And I guess we gone keep

Climbing these stairwells

Praying that we day stop going through hell.

Praying we gone live to see tomorrow

Chilling out on corners, drinking and smashing bottles,

Disrespecting our Queens that could one day grown up to be models

Or America’s next top scholars

But the way I hear it,

From the way you spin it

We not the only ones with problems

Suburbs keeping their problems on the low

With a different class of people.

Guess we got no choice but to sit here and be the

Faces of poverty and the end all of humanity.

You call my home the projects

But I wonder what have you done for me lately?

Because all I see are all of these stair wells leading me to nothing

While you sit around acting like you have built us any favors.

Author's Note

Note that through the poem there are points throughout the story mode poem that I switch between voices and people and cities. I hope that I made the transitions as clear and as thought out as possible.