ANGRY HILL

And from the angry hill, if I don’t get killed,

I stand and look over the overlooked.

I see 1970, when, with clenched fists,

wearing beards and beads,

afros and dashikis,

people proudly punched through ceilings,

punched the skies and shouted

"Power to the people"

and young artisans punched eyelets

in archipelagos of leather.

I see 1970, and after,

the Drag and industry, and after,

the Drag, the dreadlocks and the drugs,

I see the misery of Sewer City and I ask,

how conscious were we,

how conscious are we?

I see brothers, like Harry Hippie,

in the throes of vagrancy,

liming on the Promenade of the Prince,

the new home for the homeless, the aimless

and the mad where the conscious and the soulful

once sold sandals while the conscienceless

sold dope to hook and drag

brothers through the mud like Hector's hapless corpse.

I have seen the hooked, like bachac, in procession,

dragging the spoils of their conquest of distress

to the Drag to exchange, for almost nothing,

for coke, for smoke, for rocks, for stone,

while the conscious sat and looked

and said nothing and did nothing, and I ask,

how conscious were we,

how conscious are we?

And from the angry hill, if I don’t get killed,

I stand and look over the overlooked.

And I remember, NUFF respect, how the young

and foolish, the conscious and idealistic

like Jones and Jeffers once went up into the hills

and went down, for almost nothing, in a hail

of the Fox’s bullets before he posed with gun

on shoulders and his boots upon their chest.

And I see the conscious, forty years after,

emerging from amnesia of annual processions,

walking up the hill again like zombies

awoken from the sleep and shadows of the past

and I wonder, how conscious were we,

how conscious are we?

I see 1990, twenty years after,

I see 1990, and after,

the holy war, guns and gangsters, and after,

the ignorance of young fools killing each other,

for almost nothing, for ranks, for turf,

for the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel.

Then I take a walk up Frederick Street

where the hip and the holy once would meet

and congregate with the conscious

and the conscienceless.

I keep walking to the high walls, the cold walls,

now crowded with the children of the conscious

and the conscienceless

and I remember Mice and Nyah,

the King brothers and Guerra and Dole

and all the other gangsters, the monsters

and ministers of mayhem and blood money

how they murdered each other

and how nine evil men came to a doleful end

but the Orinoco, the Orinoco and the blood still flow;

and I wonder who they were fronting for,

who they were fronting for,

who they were fronting for,

and I wonder, how conscious were we,

how conscious were we,

how conscious are we,

how conscious are we?

And from the angry hill, if I don’t get kilIed,

I stand and look over the overlooked.

©2011 by G. Newton V. Chance