heART

Opening

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I jumped off a bridge and landed on top of a slow moving freight train leaving The South Bronx. The boy I was wanted freedom.

I leaped the Grand Canyon wide spaces of the cargo cars. I ran and leaped from car to car. I leaned forward as if I were on a surfboard when the train rose above the trees.

Freedom was the song running through my hair.

And only the sun was brighter than my joy.

What happened next was unbelievable

Almost Heaven. West Virginia.

As I coughed blood in a hospital of strangers, I journey the better angel of my nature, to the boy I was who wanted to travel beyond Bronx, beyond Earth.

Life

To Be Continued

Homelessness Made Easy For Dummies

by Daniel Angel Aponte

of Public School 161

Copyrighted 2018

Is that God, wondered the boy I was while being potty trained in front of an eye on a TV set. It was the time of the first space age president who said we go to the moon not because it’s easy but because it’s difficult.

I wanted to know more about God when I took a screwdriver to the back of the TV that revealed The Wizard Of Oz. 

I saw a beautiful city made from glass tubes that glowed with the color of golden amber.

How does it all work? Who dreamed this? I wanted to be part of this amazing invention.

I crawled into a TV set discarded in a backyard and looked out to a neighborhood of burnt out buildings. The small screen called Television was a vast wasteland believed the first president of The Federal Communication Committee.

I saw a cowboy from Death Valley Days ride out into The South Bronx as President Ronald Reagan who promised to rebuild a town for the working poor and those that looked for work. In a heat wave, I walked for hours to prevent homelessness from visiting my disabled mother. A borrowed Android accompanied me to record my journey for whomever it may concern in the future. Moving forward, I went back in memories.

On the street was a Newsweek magazine with my birthday. On the cover was a picture of a boy with eyes closed in dream mode. It’s what I have in the way of a baby picture of myself. With another discarded item on Global Warming, I found art later used in a collage for a page on Facebook I would call Homelessness Made Easy For Dummies

I popped out of a dumpster across my second home called Public School 161.

I had the wood to build my time machine for the science fair.

I also built a shoeshine box to set shop between a newsstand and The White House, an Italian American supermarket on Prospect Street.

I made money to buy wires and mini light bulbs to be put together with a soldering pen.

I was 7 years old with dreams of being a scientist.

At the age of 5, I invented a space ship made from a paper cup before creating a sleek ship made from construction paper and copper fasteners.

Creativity is a great mystery

Copyrighted 2018 by Daniel Angel Aponte

All Human Rights Reserved

Inside Dope

 I wake up.

I feed the birds with bread.

Beyond the fluttering of wings on the fire escape, I see the funeral parlor.

I saw police block off the streets. I saw a multitude of people of different colors united in their grief for a boy who dreamed of becoming a cop. In that funeral home, I once attended the wake for a cop that grew up on our neighborhood. His name was Jessie Nazario. He worked out of the stationhouse on Story Ave.

The police commissioner came to pay his respects and walked out somber to the cameras of the news media and crowd with cell phones among signs with the legend that read

Justice For Junior

Junior was dragged out of a bodega and butchered by a Dominican gang. According to detectives, it was the same one responsible for the multiple stabbings of another Dominican boy on June 18 2018. 

I was shot at while playing hide and seek in the time when The Bronx looked like parts of Britain after Blitzkrieg. I saw swastikas sewn onto the denim and leather jackets of a Puerto Rican gang called The Savage Skulls.

I saw them butcher an innocent man with chains and planks of wood with nails. The man looked up with blood running down his face like Jesus forced to wear a crown of thorns. He let out a scream born from the insanity of mindless violence.

He ran screaming across the street where a car almost hit him. He took refuge in a butcher shop run by Cubans. The gang tried to storm the shop to drag out that poor man but the Cubans stood their ground as they had done when they took to the seas to escape Communism.

I was haunted by the horrors I’ve seen in my childhood as haunted as the children of The New Millennium of school massacres in greater regularity.   

People move on to the next tragedy and pray that tragedy that doesn’t befall on them.

I looked up and saw chickens on a conveyor. Their squawking silenced by a quick dip into a vat of scalding water. Featherless, the chickens were individually placed on scales, packaged and sold, one to my mother. I saw the quiet eyes of lambs and goats stare at me. 

I was in a slaughterhouse in The South Bronx where my mother was served eviction papers after she broke her arm due to the negligence of the landlord’s workers that were finally summoned by city inspectors to make repairs. On the face of a kitchen clock on the wall is the Lamb of God in The Last Supper. I eat my meals like I’m on Death Row related to the thief nailed next to a Good Jewish Lawyer who promised to get the thief off the hooks by breaking the law that states there no second acts in American lives or the lives of people on Earth.

I wake up.

I feed the birds.

 Beyond the fluttering of wings, I see the funeral parlor and beyond the blue.

   

I wake up.

I feed the birds with bread.

Beyond the fluttering of wings on the fire escape, I see the funeral parlor.

I saw police block off the streets. I saw a multitude of people of different colors united in their grief for a boy who dreamed of becoming a cop. In that funeral home, I once attended the wake for a cop that grew up on our neighborhood. His name was Jessie Nazario. He worked out of the stationhouse on Story Ave.

The police commissioner came to pay his respects and walked out somber to the cameras of the news media and crowd with cell phones among signs with the legend that read

Justice For Junior

Junior was dragged out of a bodega and butchered by a Dominican gang. According to detectives, it was the same one responsible for the multiple stabbings of another Dominican boy on June 18 2018. 

I was shot at while playing hide and seek in the time when The Bronx looked like parts of Britain after Blitzkrieg. I saw swastikas sewn onto the denim and leather jackets of a Puerto Rican gang called The Savage Skulls.

I saw them butcher an innocent man with chains and planks of wood with nails. The man looked up with blood running down his face like Jesus forced to wear a crown of thorns. He let out a scream born from the insanity of mindless violence.

He ran screaming across the street where a car almost hit him. He took refuge in a butcher shop run by Cubans. The gang tried to storm the shop to drag out that poor man but the Cubans stood their ground as they had done when they took to the seas to escape Communism.

I was haunted by the horrors I’ve seen in my childhood as haunted as the children of The New Millennium of school massacres in greater regularity.   

People move on to the next tragedy and pray that tragedy that doesn’t befall on them.

I looked up and saw chickens on a conveyor. Their squawking silenced by a quick dip into a vat of scalding water. Featherless, the chickens were individually placed on scales, packaged and sold, one to my mother. I saw the quiet eyes of lambs and goats stare at me. I was in a slaughterhouse in The South Bronx where my mother was served eviction papers after she broke her arm due to the negligence of the landlord’s workers that were finally summoned by city inspectors to make repairs. On the face of a kitchen clock on the wall is the Lamb of God in The Last Supper. I eat my meals like I’m on Death Row related to the thief nailed next to a Good Jewish Lawyer who promised to get the thief off the hooks by breaking the law that states there no second acts in American lives or the lives of people on Earth.

I wake up.

I feed the birds.

 Beyond the fluttering of wings, I see the funeral parlor and beyond the blue.

   

Planet Poet

My mother’s husband tried to drown me in the bathtub.

He didn’t know how I amazed my friends by holding my breath longer than anyone in the pool at the Saint Mary’s park recreational center where hallways are painted with the images of Marvel superheroes like Captain America

Not ready to breath water, my brain flashed exit strategies until it settled on one:

PLAY DEAD

The boy I was went into violent convulsions and then lifeless in the waters. And that horrific scene made my poor mother’s spouse let go of my neck and run out of the apartment with an awful shriek into the streets of The South Bronx. 

I stood up on golden sands of Orchard Beach, The French Riviera of The Bronx, and pulled down my first diver’s mask purchased with money I made from shining shoes opposite a newsstand next to The White House, a supermarket on Prospect Street.

 I walked on water before a galaxy of an ocean made me feel the power of flight span wider than the white wings of seagulls in shades of blue skies.

The waters washed over memories of belt lashings on my back and healed me from the brutality of gangs, police, politicians, bullies jealous of my grades, drugs and addicts in burnt out buildings and other social ills spoiling a beautiful planet.

As the boy I was flew deeper into a part of Heaven on Earth called The Atlantic, he heard the sea sing like angels in songs never heard by human beings. Not a word. Experience.

Freedom.

This is freedom

I was free.

Freedom to find Atlantis

How poetic I’m Aquarius

The Water Bearer

To Be Continued

http://admericaintechnicolor.blogspot.com

Copyrighted Art & Text & Photography By

 DAAD/ Daniel Angel Aponte Dreamer 2017

When I was a boy, I looked at an eclipse with my bare eyes in The South Bronx of burnt out buildings.

A strange thing happened afterward.

A bright light appeared in front of my bedroom window, as did a hurricane inside my room that scattered my comic books around, among other objects.

I was being pulled into the light.

It was sheer force of will that prevented the little boy I was from disappearing into another dimension.

I wasn’t ready for a new reality.

This is the persistence of my memory. 

I recall being gifted in childhood with photographic memory and creativity.

I remember doctors that wanted to administer a new drug designed to dissolve a gland in the head of the little boy I was.

 I stared into the eyes of a doctor. He didn’t give me the drug.

The place where it happened was destroyed.

Today, it’s a parking lot of sorts for The New York City Police Department.

In The New Millennium, a young American man tried to get inside the building my mother has resided in for decades.

 He identified himself as Mark Wilson, a reporter for The New York Post.

He wanted to interview eyewitnesses to several bright lights across the building that hovered for a few seconds before taking off at unbelievable speed.

I studied pictures on his cell phone. 

Mister Wilson, I am sure you are reading this, as I am sure of scientific evidence to prove aliens have been on this gem of a planet for thousands of years.

One of the aliens is called poverty.

Make with the mild mannered reporter thing and help change the world for the best.

I am transmitting this final message from a public library in The South Bronx.

Afterward, I will go out into the street and look into the eclipse.

I wasn’t ready to leave the world when I was a kid.

I am ready

Now

My Re@l Life @s @ Comic Book

New York Radiology made MRI of my brain. Conceptual art and text by

D@niel @ngel @ponte

Copyrighted 2017

http://admericaintechnicolor.blogspot.com