Let The City Know.
When the sun falls
And the shadows unfurl
Behind rusting bars
The heartbeats of home lie in snippets of dim blue pulsing.
Across their peeling adobe,
The wind just trots,
But behind them,
A blue screen blares:
“The world
Rushes further
To rot.”
When sunlight returns,
From the same adobe,
These tiny creatures emerge.
Splashing outward in waves,
Eyes abundant with sky,
They sing past the iron gates, too:
The excerpts of new, unbarred worlds coursing.
J.T.
Did you hear?! It was another galvanizing night in The City! Wednesday night in downtown L.A. saw an amazing lineup of performances from Inner-City Arts, Homeboy Industries, and of course, the InsideOUT Writers and J.T!
The set also included a handful of local actors, poets and writers, and even hip hop dancers and comedians, each of whom delivered their own brand of the magic that makes L.A. one of the foremost creative hubs on the map.
To cap things off, it was one of IOW’s youngest writers — a sixteen year old ‘Ms. Jackson’ — who closed out the show when her performance was met with a standing ovation by a raucous crowd!
The night was the first of its kind for IOW at the venue, due in no small part to the gracious support of the legendary Richard Cabral. But rest assured, if you missed us, there will be more soon! Hanging and gliding through The City together, the road has never been brighter.
J.T.
Stripped of all your traffic, and wrapped up in the slender calm and silence of the night, your true colors reveal you to be the same old patch of pueblos like the dry lands that used to be frequented only by humble pobladores all those years ago.
In moments like these, it’s clear that despite every effort to get lofty, you’re still not so different from the myriad of country-towns all across the nation, surrounded by an emptiness so vast between arid earth and infinite sky.
Even so, tomorrow when you’re a bright, fancy metropolis again, which has little to no time for the pobladores —or any ole roots for that matter– I’ll still see you.
Together we’ll make two transient beings strutting through the corridors of a time and space we like to think we can bend if we use enough of our imagination.
The people will rise to meet us with another smile under the sunshine then, and of course we’ll return the gleam right back. We’ll be back to business as usual, and will be oh so good at business as usual again.
Everyone will buy it all, or buy enough of it anyway, and it’ll be another laid back day in the city of L.A.,
But when the sun sets on the boulevard, and when all of the smiles of the people dim back into the inevitable stillness of their faces,
When the people retreat back into their shells, to trudge back into their innards,
That’s when all that will be left is the void between us again.
I don’t know exactly how it’ll be, but I do know it’ll probably show us
Once again, how
Even after all we might know about each other,
We’ve still got so much more to learn about each other.
I will see you there, old friend,
And will greet you, as always,
With flailing, helpless arms
J.T.
Meeting The City again,
It’s an old friend, for a new
When, the People rise,
Lost and found
Unbound as they race across
Imaginary lines,
Like meteorites
Flashing through space.
Faces made of iron, gleaming in the light,
Racing past giants
Like Mercury before the one,
They are all stars, as much as they are stardust.
The sky is their biggest fan,
Watching them
Studying them
Loving them
Through infinity, in the blink of an eye.
An angel tried to tell me my fate the other day,
Not knowing how I am the darkness
Which towers over the night.
When the angel discovered this about me,
It retreated to the heavens.
To which I said, so be it:
I needed no light
To see the night as
My only destiny. And
Glowing in my darkness,
I smiled at the bright side of my face:
For this dim depth,
It guides me just as much as any other trace.