Shanti’s Dispatches

I found this poem on the Internet…

The lust for something more oozes from these streets
Like the awful stench of ambition once had
Thrown away for something as ridiculous and human as love
She thousands of miles away in the Southern California sun
While sounds of Notorious B.I.G. intermix with Spanish salsa here
And car alarms pierce the air like a wretched birdís final death scream, every 15 minutes
Muted several later, if not many more
Quick bursts of Spanish tongues echo back and forth in indistinguishable cacophony
Not strangers but family to these streets
One with the smells and concrete and desires of this place
Unheard of wealth traded back and forth by white men in coats
Downtown on the most famous of financial Streets
Now guarded by men with M-16s and riot gear
For the invisible beast lurks in dark corners of the earth now, not afraid to strike here
Since that fateful September day
In dark shadows and blistering deserts, the invisible beast trains for a dark insurmountable war
While we strike back with swords slashing as if at ghosts in the cold night air
Hoping we have destroyed the beast, never quite knowing for sure
The familiarity of a former, more suburban Midwest life beckons from afar
Its simplicity and boringness an acceptable price to pay for the silence of its lonesome, quiet streets
Friends and memories of college years gone away, the fear of being alone all pervasive
While in these streets of Harlem, thousands of people lust for something greater
Coming from distant Hispanic and Dominican lands, to this noisy concrete jungle
We march onward as a species in the indomitable quest for Progress, or is it merely Survival we are seeking?
Nothing it seems will quench this thirst from within. No answer out there or in here it seems can tell me what all of this is for and why I am here.
Walking back and forth daily across Broadway, the thought comes to me that my existence would be much more easily explained if a passing bus were to randomly and through no fault of my own smash my meager existence to pieces.
That would be the quick and easy answer to my reason for being on this planet and on my tombstone it would simply read:
Mowed down in Harlem at the tender age of twenty-four by a NYC metro bus. He had such great potential, too.

But alas, answers to existential crisis rarely arrive in such a decisive, physical form.
There will be an answer again, and she will have the devilís eyes.
I will do anything once again just to look into those eyes, and they will likely betray me, just like all the rest before.

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