Cambridge, Mass ("walk with me" series, vol. 3)

something or other. Thinking about crafting a place-based series of short story-poem hybrids (tentatively titled, "walk with me") as I'm midway through writing the third iteration lol

Thousands of stories step through a wide, forgiving intersection;

Students trample over history.

Locals way-find off abused paths along less-driven lanes—a child, for instance, cuts hard to avoid Mass Ave, favoring a skip down Main.

Memorial Drive swings you East, eliding institutes to introduce shopping malls, open plazas, and small pocket parks filled with green;

skaters fill Lynch, and Eggs Park on the other side of the scene,

grown men cracking their vertebrae for clips like fiends while BMX bikers emerge from ramps and bowls with legs a-splay

Kendall comprises coldness—a clinical coordination of commuters across crosswalks while pedestrians with cross faces cut consterned glances at folks of concentrated color;

alienation and hypervisibility abound as cameras capture our countenances and surveil us as prey

Private green lands abound in the evil empire, manicured hedges manufactured by horticulturists at odd hours as ground falls fallow to dollars and

Industry begets industry as our institutional landlords implement price hikes and imbricate parcels for biotech and software sprawl

So let’s cut northwest and enter the Port at a jog, shoes plodding and stomping like a swung kick drum on a D’Angelo song

Youthfulness mucks about the interior streets as the afternoon hours approach, bikes busying about as playgrounds fill with brilliance

Aspiring artists, architects, gear heads, engineers, lucid dreamers, and future putrid pols fill the pews in a strip of tea bars and cafés,

Devout career-builders find free moments to connect over frustration before they hop and trudge to the bus stop,

gripping bars and handles to prevent momentum sway.

A seminary up near Broadway brings brothers and sisters into sacred space to honor the words of prophets and angels, before Allah they genuflect to pray,

heads and shoulders turned southeast towards Mecca, our feet follow their worship as we make our way

Prospect runs into Western Ave and River Street, a subdivide to cleave Cambridgeport from Riverside, where Sly cuts heads and Cambridge houses its public

Community centers commit their commoners to courses, feed families, educate the earnest, provide pre-adolescents property to play

The kids fulfill spectra and quota as they grow to adulthood, as their city grows in love and geography while under watchful gaze

Uniformed operatives circle Central Square to keep loiterers, Black and brown youth, and the unhoused on edge in mental disarray

Mere yards astray from City Hall and the Post Office, blocks from the public library, a brisk stroll south of CRLS; the state’s positive and negative apparatuses on full display

We press past and push feet against pavement and pick up the pace

Folks got cans to shake, stickers to paste, chants to echo on solo missions towards the end of genocide while weapons manufacturers sit blocks away

This might be where our walk concludes (I gotta make some personal pit stops and politick with some homies so we can stay in tune); but forthcoming soon, potentially a part two to address the spindles of empire in Harvard and the towering facades of Alewife with a tad bit of delay.

from nearly 3 and a half years ago, in my traipsing days