nothing shakin' on shakedown street
RIGHT SO. This is a poem I have been working on for like, literally months and months (I posted an early draft of it back in April? May? I don't know, I'd check but that would involve actual effort and I AM OPPOSED). Basically it's... a poem about Cleveland and a Grateful Dead song? Or, more accurately, it's a poem I started drafting after someone I knew was ragging on Cleveland and the song "Shakedown Street" came on in my car, and that suddenly felt very relevant and oh, man. Suffice to say: there are currently SIXTEEN versions of this on my hard drive, but I'm actually relatively happy with this one. So I'm throwing it up here for you guys to look at, and maybe that'll mean that I stop pulling it out every few weeks and staring at it like a nutcase, y/y?
Probably not, but a girl can hope.
cleveland from the corner of 79th and shakedown street
this is the true story of this city:
we live in the shadow of a river we quietly set on fire when we thought no one was looking, the child of the midwest at the matches again
and if you added every pothole to all the basements without houses to every useless fucking grave i think you could dig to china, the shovel rough against your hands, splintering against your tender palms in those last places where the weather hasn't hardened you
and the train that takes me to work trawls through a part of town that i don't walk, an abandoned string of factories with tires littering the treescape, and at the end there is the scarred raw skeleton of a swingset waiting for burial, chains swinging loose in the wind
and when i tell people where i'm from, they apologize to me.
but in the soft spaces in between what we say and what we mean there is this history, buried under three months' snow and a legacy of losing streaks, stained brown and orange with the things we think we deserve. somewhere 'round here there is the first book i ever lost and the first smile i ever won and my first and greatest kisses, and there's no one who isn't digging for that, for the diet of lost causes they were raised on in the sidewalk beneath their feet.
(ya know, there are these shattered things that weave their way into our lives so quietly that we almost forget about them until we see, until the man on the street spits near our coffee, until we glance to the left on our train ride to work and want to cry for the stupid empty fucked up broke down swingset bones on 79th
so don't tell me this town ain't got no heart)
Probably not, but a girl can hope.
cleveland from the corner of 79th and shakedown street
this is the true story of this city:
we live in the shadow of a river we quietly set on fire when we thought no one was looking, the child of the midwest at the matches again
and if you added every pothole to all the basements without houses to every useless fucking grave i think you could dig to china, the shovel rough against your hands, splintering against your tender palms in those last places where the weather hasn't hardened you
and the train that takes me to work trawls through a part of town that i don't walk, an abandoned string of factories with tires littering the treescape, and at the end there is the scarred raw skeleton of a swingset waiting for burial, chains swinging loose in the wind
and when i tell people where i'm from, they apologize to me.
but in the soft spaces in between what we say and what we mean there is this history, buried under three months' snow and a legacy of losing streaks, stained brown and orange with the things we think we deserve. somewhere 'round here there is the first book i ever lost and the first smile i ever won and my first and greatest kisses, and there's no one who isn't digging for that, for the diet of lost causes they were raised on in the sidewalk beneath their feet.
(ya know, there are these shattered things that weave their way into our lives so quietly that we almost forget about them until we see, until the man on the street spits near our coffee, until we glance to the left on our train ride to work and want to cry for the stupid empty fucked up broke down swingset bones on 79th
so don't tell me this town ain't got no heart)