Weekly Southern Poetry - Paraiso
Paraiso
They called this place Paradise
A long time ago
A jewel on the ocean
Gleaming towers of glass and steel
Parks of green grass and trees
Wide boulevards lined with palms
Fountains, museums, theaters
A lattice network of canals and marinas
The beauty of the tropics
Now the palm trees are dead
Fire ants live in the parks
The storefronts are boarded up
The ones that aren’t looted
Or burned
The beaches are littered with flotsam and trash
The bay is polluted with oil and sewage
Downtown is deserted
Except for gangs and graffiti
The police are afraid to go there
So the army patrols in jeeps and tanks
Soldiers on the street corners armed with radios, assault rifles, and machine guns
Now it is a militarized zone and the soldiers are losing the war
Millions live in the shanty towns on the outskirts
Or the burned out, deserted areas in midtown
Where anything can be had for a price
And nobody cares
A man sells his daughters as easily as homemade brew
From an illicit still
Or hard drugs home grown locally or imported from afar
Guns and drugs are easier to find and cheaper to buy than food and shelter
Armed gangs run the streets
And fight for control with each other and the army and police
A kingdom of litter and ruins
Empty, abandoned, decaying
Except for the scum, the drug addicts, the pushers, the hookers, the whores
The thieves, the vagrants, the beggars
The desperate already dead with nothing left to lose
The rich that are still here
Live behind walls in mansions like fortresses high on the hills
Overlooking the dead, desolate devastation below
With their own private mercenary security
A third army among the soldiers and police
The fountains are empty and silent
The bridges are crumbling, they don’t fix the streets anymore
The canals are filled with the refuse of a million animals
Nothing can grow in the toxicity
The buses and trains don’t run anymore
They sit behind fences, vandalized, stripped, and covered with graffiti
Skyscrapers stand empty and vacant
Except for the squatters who broke in and colonized the lower floors
Sometimes the power works
Sometimes the night is only lit by explosions and gunfire
As the city slowly implodes and kills itself
The police and soldiers barely holding it together with baling wire
While its underguts feed on each other and eat it out from within
Sometimes the water works, sometimes the sewer and storm drains are clear
When they break they don’t fix them anymore
Except where the rich live and can pay for protection
Leaving the poor to drink and eat and bathe in their own pollution
The schools are all closed, nobody goes to class anymore
Except the rich in their private citadels
They don’t even bother with the dregs outside
Coming to the city is like coming to a wasteland
Or a jungle
Or a war zone
The sun still shines and the wild animals are taking over
Slowly but surely as the man-made infrastructure crumbles
They called this place Paradise
A long time ago
7-22-08 at Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood Intl. Airport
Jeff Vanderslice