Where the Guns Go Off

There is no envy of where we live: rundown apartment complexes, dangerous housing projects. Poorly zoned business districts whose warehouses cut through our landscape like the tombstone's of giants, sitting tagged and vacant from a boom that never happened. We are a single community divided amongst ourselves; a dozen or so quarter mile barrios. Each fiercely guarded by angry, misguided youth. They bleed to protect something that’s worth absolutely nothing for reasons hardly above reproach. This is the land of concrete and graffiti; broken knuckles and broken hearts; the place where flashes of light break the night and sometimes, we die. This is the crazy west side, the youth wrecker, the damager of all who dwell. This is home, where the guns go off.