Night eats day: what more
is there to know about attrition 
this is what drove us to learn
how to drive at 14
four boys in a Honda
cheap torque & already better than our
selves of yesterday
the silver finger on the dashboard said empty
– liar: where we come from
empty means dead
& what still moves cannot be empty.
       *
By 16 we rolled through streets blazing
music til it could not longer drown out
the engine of our stomachs thumping
       *
18, we figured it out; in our marrow knew
no bowl would be passed our way. We eat
only by the suppleness of iron whatever
held us before now oxidized 
cruising, we mouthed a frenzy to pedestrians (say
it with me
                        say it until you tremble)
night        eats        day        always
what the night touches is carcass
my brother feeds his brother
to his enemy because the night . . . 
I've seen it – hollow – delicious.
       *
We were Pyrex puppies at 19
nourished on hard light swollen
like the fortunate
drifting through the glossy night with
a town crier's bass in our voice
laughing at our 14-year-old selves.
We screamed at people crossing at the lights
(say it with me
                          say it until you tremble)
when you get tired of running from
danger you become the danger.
When you get tired of sucking on the void
when you get tired
you become. 

If Reece & dem had a clean run
who knows what myth would have said
of their jugg. You know, when Judge
gave them 14 for the ting, Judge's son had to
find a new dealer.
Year before, they brought a white Christmas
to the posh part of the city. 20 bricks in a Ghana-must-go enough
to build a new borough:
we christened them trap ministers.
9/11 changed wholesale prices for real
but the mandem stayed afloat                                    –[redacted]
O trap legends, teach us this buoyancy,
how to become survivors of recessions, 
immune to the boom & bust,
the bailiff's bark –
what day isn't a headlock?

North Peckham estate is the best documented and the most notorious . . . 65 multi-storey blocks all on a 40-acre site, comprising 1444 homes. This was linked to a wide pedestrian deck . . . forming a network of ways containing housing, shops and other facilities . . . Residents . . . could 'walk freely along this two and a half miles of deck away from the . . . traffic'.
– Municipal Dreams in Housing, London
Brown and gold and stretched like the slurring of
a toothless drunk. Sweet-neighbor talk
coined it a mega-estate. Your flat was in the north: one
bedroom and seven bodies making do.
You told yourself it was a small alcove
set beyond the reach of the clock's hands.
On Mondays the detergent they used to clean
the stairs smelled of bubblegum; so you would
walk through the corridors that connected one
block to another block, one joy
to another joy: a system of nerves,
a casing of sand, and endless windows.
Is this what the architect had in mind?
A paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under
a blanket, shielded from the world – 
all that hopeful good on powder-blue paper,
measured lines defining angles
of respite for the poor. What foresight he had
to put shops and launderettes on the estate
so mothers could send their children on errands
knowing that even if they walked a mile
their fawny ankles wouldn't ever set foot
on open ground, to be lost to the city's
clutches, or feel the affliction of rain.
How quickly rain dried, how loudly bricks
hummed again as you went back to your life,
your tinkering, your blooming, making-do.
Nothing the estate raised was a monster, yet
the devil found good ground to plough his seeds.
GABOS – the widening gyre. Residents on the brink:
washed, wrung, walking shrines asking questions to
which the architect maintained that their design was
a good solution because of the times.
It is true on paper there were no designs for a tomb
yet the East wing stairs were where Damilola was found:
blue dawn, blue body, blue lights, blue tapes.

Dark skin boys scare everything in the dark
though really 
we're just trying to scare away the dark.
Round here this is how we greet each other:
What's good, my g?
as if to say, Are you safe, my g?
Isn't this how you would call out to your friends
if you too were in a dark place,
standing on a ledge?
Shoutout to us boys who play out here.
God knows how we do it.
Maybe God doesn't know – 
maybe an estate, tall as it is,
is the half-buried femur of a dead god,
and the blue light of dawn
– his son in mourning –
looks on the things we do
when there is one less boy among us.
How we pour the holy spirit out of the bottle
onto the concrete where his ashes lie,
stir it into a clay, mould it into a new body
and like a kite in fading wind
watch his soul sink back to good earth,
settle into his body like he never left.
Isn't this what you would do for your friends
if you to were in a dark place,
standing on the edge? ♦