ABC’s of Death

When I step out my front door glossed with cracked paint out onto my stoop in Southwest Baltimore Md I peer down at the cracked pavement and lift my head to the desert that is home.

Devoid of a suburbanization that I would resent anyway and it feels less. I see what could be through the shell of what is.

The cracked sidewalks that have been overgrown with contents of the earth, it struggles to hold back life itself.

The vacant homes that litter the all but few blocks in Baltimore seem to invert the sense that these neighborhoods are place for humans to reside in but the remnants of a town destroyed or even a burgeoning neighborhood ready to bounce back from recovery.

I have no place to go I feel at home but feel at home because what else could there be.

Any attempt to venture out into the surrounding area is soured with the idea that there aren’t too many places that feel like a home away from home never mind the constant messages from friends and family upon departure from one place to another to quote, “Be Safe”.

Just traveling from one supposed safe zone to the next implies you may encounter someone who appears to present themselves as a reflection but on the inside harbors the means to end you.

Most of the folks you meet may be harboring the preceding feeling that seems to present itself when the boundaries of implied disrespect are made evident but more often than not folks interact with a friendliness that can seem to only be found in small cities like Baltimore.

Besides the lonely streets that are absent of multitudes of people found traversing them at anytime there are small isolated bands of folks who walk the streets daily with routines that amount to their survival and leave possible mobile patrons almost overexposed to the constant and consistent interjecting interactions of commerce that almost make the inexistence of places to legitimately purchase things, bearable.

You heard it all before, no rec centers, no schools that provide a semblance of fruitful learning experience, no affordable and clean housing, et el. etc. but ultimately no space.

The whole of the modus operandi of people who have been put into positions of power by the community has been selfish agendas executed with poor strategy and unabashedly greedy tact.

Redlining, disinvestment, poor education among other things are the technologies in which a policy of necropolitics is enacted.

There isn’t an investment in prevention but a strategy to put people in their places. Some places resemble spaces of the living where living is provided the opportunity of space and the ability to flex its wings and gather its strength.

There is a whole history behind poor black communities that produces, as they say with systems theory, a “feedback loop” of denigration.

When those of us that reside here look at the news we cannot help but feel for the folks in other places on earth as theirs is also a reflexive and reflecting performance in the spectacle of violence and devastation visited upon them in their own geographical locations.

You can’t help but have empathy and sympathy because you find yourself in the same political loci that gets fleshed out in all the relations possible (socio-historico-economico-politico) around the world.

Even though you don’t share the same geo location you share all the other oppressive ism’s against your body, mind, and spirit and cannot help but feel a common brother/sisterhood.

The state of mind and body is fixed within a necropolitics of control and domination over life through death, exhibited through many apparatus and culture codifications.

The despair is shared throughout the oppressed body politic with common threads of exploitation enforced brutality, racialization, and in most areas a depression and repression under the strongest thumb ever to grace the modern world against those in the years of their life that holds the most hope and energy for changing their current circumstances.

With Austerity, Advantage, and Avoidance; Bombs Batons and Bullets; Culture Colonization, and Curriculum, among other combinations the ABC’s of death become historical lesson that becomes a perpetual daily nightmare replacing any dream that could’ve been strived for.