She's been pretty mean, this street
In her passive aggressive way
All the windows looking at you
In your $10 shirt
Your $15 shoes
Your $14.95 pants
Your $10 shades still making you look cooler
But the windows are the only ones watching
You stop just long enough to look at a girls legs as she rounds a corner
Lipstick matching her 5in 17 year old hot pink heels, you think she must taste like some memory of another girl you've had
That's how a street satisfies itself
It's always looking and you're never alone
Your tilt your chest up a bit and a blind man asks you for number 40
You lead him to the library and the problem that still lives is just that
Life; living
You live this all and resist buying a almond candy bar because you need that dollar to pay for a metro to go gets drinks you can't afford with too much money in your pocket
And you are the street
You're the smell so putrid it tastes itself on your tongue
And you wear all black now
You cut your hair differently
You can hear the accent trying to stab its way through the Kevlar of your suburban cartoon upbringing where you could never take anything more seriously than yourself
And everyones hypocrisy was an annoyance and now you're just part of it you feel
You bought your $14.95 jeans in black because you saw that's what people wear you wanna blend and be happy and see and stray lapping the blocks till you know brooklyn better than home because you fought so hard to be here
You never cried even though you left
You left the people who love you and they were crying because they knew you were flying away from the formation they all formed
They knew you had already left years ago when you came back from your trip
You looked at them and tried to act like you cared but you didn't
You never really do
Because this street is a part of you
Your grandfather lived in bushwick 60 years ago and now the DeVine name has gone full circle even though your grandmother only has a month to live and you said awful things to people who mattered and you tried to look like you care but all you care about
Is being a cog
Is struggling
You wanted to struggle but now that your next meal isn't a sure thing,
But the next drink is, you can only come up with the word resentment now to describe it because your uncle uses the word a lot
But
You never can really care
You can never really invest yourself
You make black friends and speak some Spanish but every morning you always wake up a Clark kent and never a superman
You look in shop windows at your reflection to make sure someone's looking
You're more than scared of going under the surface in a river that is this place
But it's the only place you want to call a home
You want to go back home
Home; your definition. just an idea and you want to leave and stay and can't make up your mind about caring or not and everything is objective and you can turn away from abuse and friends and you can leave because you looked like you cared when you stepped on the bus to the terminal.
So you look at her with her hot bubble gum shiny out of the box heels clicking with uninterrupted purpose down the cracked uneven dis-colored s*** covered sidewalk pressing those lips together and she's wanted.
And you can taste the saliva and smell the musk of another girl and everything becomes a projection and you become a sidewalk in just a simple stroll down the street out your front door looking for something more to do than what still feels like nothing