Before the Beauty.Or. How Could U Forget?

locate the closest overlooked neighborhood — at its core extract all humans living underneath life’s bootheel. replace with millennials cradling postcolonial guilt, but not. ignore the woman’s cardboard [ help ] sign tattered, stained & broken like her: imagine being long-ago unseen, erased in between the throng, an existing non-entity. ask, too, if gun be an instrument what refrain whizzed soundless amid crestfallen shadows lingering a decade. go from “a to z” to list the dead — too many to name, but try: antoine, byrd, carlos, delante ... no deader now than then. still a memory real, cold steel, shots fired — death, what did we know of dying? don’t forget love, a love strangling addicts caught in a docetic whirlwind with no blue sail. before the corner becomes distorted remember: one more time inhale deep. inhale memory to include the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.