The city streets were a washed out grey. The sky was a rock-pounded denim. Birdsong trickled out in dented waves, as if feathered friends cried this way. Engines started and stopped. Horns honked. Crowds, heads low, kept their eyes on concrete cracks. No whispers. No chat. Either yelling or nothing at all. Society, society, wherefore art thou society?
Art is our medication here in the inner-city. Graffiti is soul paracetamol. Music is life. In a pressure cooker of rage, it is the outlet. In an utterly dark room it is light through a keyhole. Forget the coppers and the wigged criminals, art is what saves the streets.
In a sigh of lamplight, rain drizzled down the hill. Damp. All was so very damp. It would take a magician grander than I to conjure heat from the shivering cold. The air was a scrooge, stealing warmth pennies it needed not. Eyes could not plead with city smog. Even the nightingales only leaked a slow lamenting warble.
You'll find more phoenix's in the inner-city because these lives of stress burn us into ashes. Yet what would you do, if those whom you love, if those who look up to you and depend upon you, needed you to rise again? You'd become the bird of fire wings and light up the night. You'd become a legend, not for fame, nor for ego's fan, but for love and survival's sake.
If you want to see the real effects of the money-nexus, of the harm stress does to the body, brain, society and the environment... welcome to the inner-city.
In the inner-city our graffiti is our rainbows, the stories of our inner-rain.
Here in the inner-city we are reinventing the art of forming a community that loves and cares for one another. We are each other's best hope for a future worth working towards.