Moving Pictures - A Bronx Hip-Hop Bio-Collage-Take 1!

Moving Pictures

Catholic High School
a backdrop
my brother wears a flat top
with an arrow crowning his head.
My best friend’s brother shot in the face,
dead.
A girl goes crazy in McDonald’s
And breaks a mirror,
Fast food circus floor
Covered with shards of glass,
girl fights in front of Zaro's Bakery
females whooping ass.

Community College applications,
Voguing at Emerald City
and the Palladium, dancing
Joints thrust between my lips,
Head rushes from Indian cigarettes,
Grown men feeling my tits.
Locking lips with Chinamen,
locking lips with brothamen
fading bruise around both eyes
virginity was a holy gift to me,
protecting, controlling light
blinding my guilt
and my eyesight.

City Island Blues
in a horny young man’s Hyundai Excel,
my mind too busy to mend
never denying my thirst as I ran from
the perils of pleasure
with broken running shoes
filled up rum bottles with water
after I drank the booze.

My mother slipped my feet in heels
for a Coming of Age Debutantes Ball.
That was my first fall,
winners were ones who knew how to raise money
and had no new ideas or poise at all.

Too lazy to run
sneakers and heels tied anyway,
tried anyway
to go away
to college
which I did,
17 just a kid,
still just a kid.
Bone straight hair touching the back
of my upright broken chair,
my cubic circonian engagement ring
thrown at a moving car
on the Bruckner Express.
Outside my mouth pretty
inside my words a mess.
Martinez and her generous mother,
her dead, very young brother
lived with her Puerto Rican Grandmother
who loved me but saw me as a nigger
separate from her,
another.

In the early 90’s there was a jungle in my head
2008,
The jungle is my bed.
Years before I would smoke a Jay,
I would fantasize about going back to Cali
With L.L. Cool ‘J.’
His full lips
a chain around my neck.
He need love, I need love
he would whisper to me in his
pre-concert microphone check.
L.L. Cool ‘J’
Teen magazine page away,
body on my dirty, paint peeling wall
worshipping fantasy because
reality was weak to me,
imagination always wins overall, y’all-
CUT!

by Tiffany M.