Asphyxia by Gentrification
for Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)
by Jack Fritscher
Cities breathe.
Sometimes they inhale you.
Sometimes they exhale you.
Experience teaches wisdom.
I may love the city.
The city may not love me back.
Not adjusted where I am,
run down the moon,
go where my adjustment is.
Get out of Dodge,
pack up,
make my same mistakes
in another city.
Baudelaire
bitched
squatting homeless:
“The form of a city
changes more quickly,
alas! than the human heart.”
Clutching my pearls,
with socialist hauteur,
I decided not to buy a home.
I lost playing gay Monopoly
while my landlord spun the chamber
turning rent control into Russian roulette.
Paris grew tired
of Hemingway’s Lost Generation
and took on new lovers.
I been kicked out
of better places than this.
I am causing my own suffering.
As a hoarder packing up
my Buddhist art books,
I should know better.