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.