What's the Night!

What’s the night!

He shouted as his burnt sienna

skin peddled towards Goss Avenue

on the newly paved street, spiffed

up just weeks before the neighborhood

festival. In his youth, Goss had been

neighborhood stores and bars.

Shotgun houses and camelbacks,

where his people had lived for generations.

Now the locals were gone and the restaurants

and bars were trendy, where politicians

had election night celebrations.

What’s the night!

He shouted as he passed by houses

that thirty years ago, would sit vacant

or the doors would be firmly locked against

intruders or the addicted. Now they were

filled with young professionals, who

manicured lawns and walked their dogs.

Houses would be flipped rather than left to

decay and went for prices that he could only

imagine and could never be afforded

by all the people he once knew.

What’s the night!

He demanded to know, as he looked

at sidewalks without cracks, but with

newly designed intersections made for

ease of pedestrian traffic, and he found

himself alone, in place where he was

told by police to take it somewhere

else and he no longer belonged there.

And he screamed it over and over wanting

to know where the place went where it

used to be okay to just be crazy.