Broken Bottles

I remember as a young child, sitting on the stone steps of my South Philadelphia neighborhood, Inquisitively witnessing the massive amounts of scattered debris, sprinkled across the concrete sidewalks & black asphalt streets... Like a nuclear waste site of embittered souls in retreat, from something I had yet to really meet, but what interested me was the clear & dark & brown & green empty broken bottles that seemed to create its own dangerous art form, that spelled lacerations & abrasions... upon our beautiful African skin tones... when we tripped & fell against the portraits frail details, which were once completely filled bottles of bubbly ginger ale... & Pepsi & coca-colas & mountain dews & doctor peppers, that seemed to capture the juicy flavored dreams & lives magnified inside, the revealing glass receptacles of thirst quenching desires... Now guzzled up by the romantic mirage of life, where many had not become recycled and was savagely tossed like dice... shattering onto inner city floors now called ghettos & hoods & boroughs landing in tar & concrete crevices like too many needles in a hay stack, fragmented, kicked & ravaged - but not unnoticed... because, now whenever I am walking down my block thinking about my next moves to empowerment, something slightly glitters from within the dark sparking peripheral vision - sharply piercing my eyes to notice; and I am reminded of all the shattered lives, that lie parallel amongst the debris of all these broken bottles... Ray X. Johnson 5/18/99