RESPECT IS ENOUGH

THE TRUTH OF IT

Perfectly perched,

positioned for manna

from heaven to come raining out of the sky.

It’s too bad the bread of life is afraid to fall here.

We are left to our own ways

and mean devices to survive.

There is nothing left here

now that we have been compared

to Mogadishu nationally

only without the brave soldiers defending

their fallen willingly.

No all we have here is

the suits sitting with their $1000 a day lawyers

splitting and dividing up the bones as bounty.

People never mattered here

or them from somewhere else

would never had coined the term

“murder capitol of the world.”

This is not really a place where neighbor likes neighbor

for that is one fast way to lose your life.

I hate the little two minute news blurbs

used to reinforce burbs fears,

that tell of someone shot and killed

and all the people living near the dead say

“what a good neighbor he was.”

They are dead themselves already

they just haven’t caught the bullet yet.

Which is not true,

everyone here has caught the bullet,

of course it is a head shot,

the surest way to get your point across.

I love poets who write of their love for Detroit

but I wonder how much of it do they know?  

“Even though I know the air hangs over River Rouge

like the smell of a dead dog’s ass…”

Blair wrote that and he passed beyond love for Detroit

enough to kill himself here.

I am a poet and I do not love this place

full of apartheid and hate

but I respect it,

that is enough to keep me alive,

to survive on memories of yesterday

when the hate was more open and palpable,

the days of learning to adapt,

to become capable of living in a city

that has shrank to a village of strangers

where no one gives a fuck

but to judge you on

more than your skin color than your name.

It’s never been different;

always it’s been the same.

But now, now no one cares

because we all know we swim

in the same pool of shit

that is Detroit, the truth of it.

© M Durfee

12.19.2013

Blair’s line used without permission of estate.