Sidewalk Stories
The poetry I'm writing will save our souls.
Rain After School
“Stop!” a little girl in green rubber galoshes exclaims.
Cars hurry west over 10th Avenue …
Galoshes extends a protective arm across her tiny accomplice, who hides beneath the full bloom of a Tinkerbell umbrella.
When their light turns to “walk”, Galoshes marches north.
“I know that’s how y’all like to walk uptown,” she says, leading the way.
“But when we downtown, I’m gonna show you how we do it.”
Tinkerbell Umbrella toddles across the street, reaching her hand out toward Galoshes, who is there to receive her.
From the Sidewalk 🌃
You just read a vignette from my sidewalk literature project. From the Sidewalk is my newest approach to journalism, gleaning real life moments from the streets of New York to the page with a poetic touch.
From creaky pews to windy bus stops, I’ve found that the humanitarian purity of New York is both raw and beautiful, but it is buried in plain sight. Hidden in the mundane.
There are eight million stories being told every moment in this city, blossoming all at once. Beautiful moments that fill us with wonder, tragic ones that linger in our soul and hilarious ones that make you shake your head and laugh.
“Only in New York!”
But the realest drama is unfolding in sticky stairwells, between crowded deli aisles, and in secret playground meetings.
Through the years I’ve been keeping a pulse on these brief windows of humanity, capturing them through real dialogue and colorful windows of humanity.
These are interactions that I sometimes can’t believe actually happened — very real ones that I’d like to experience all over again. This is the essence of the city I love, and now, my calling is to preserve that love and share it with you.
Please enjoy.
Lisa Was His Live-In Girlfriend
Lisa and Big Mark had been together for twenty years but never married.
They began as friends of friends, then friends, eventually evolving into roommates.
As rent increased, so too did their love, eventually finding it much more comfortable in each other’s arms than out in the cold city streets.
Plus, neither wanted to let the rent-stabilized pad go.
With both reaching their high 60s and Lisa struggling with disease, Big Mark began looking for help.
“They’re saying it’s lupus,” he grumbles.
That’s when Cheryl entered the picture.
“She sure is pretty, and works a computer like you wouldn’t believe,” he exclaims with a swirling finger.
“She can’t drive for the life of her, but Big Mark can fix that.”
Cheryl, thirty and change years Big Mark’s junior, began caring for the man and his longtime girlfriend.
“It’s a wonder what you can find on Facebook,” he chuckles.
One of My Pewmates
“…is my name,” said a lady in my pew.
She had the geometry of a Picasso — that’s if he ever painted black ladies from Harlem in his later years.
“What was that?” I said. I couldn’t hear the first time because she was giggling.
“Mildred,”
she snickered.
“It’s an old-timey name.”
What Makes This Art Important?
Over the last six years, I’ve pivoted from my origins of fiction writing into the candid practicality you read every week in Down to Earth.
From self-help to spirituality, health, fitness, tech, politics, anthropology, history and more, my writing has evolved to be more useful and informative. I’ve noticed a need for wellness in my community, and New York at large. All of humanity, really — that’s why I’m building the ark that is DTE.
But my creative mind has been nudging me lately. I feel the same urgency for a creative renaissance that I feel for health-based writing.
We are living during a moment where the machines have learned to mimic the moments but not the meaning that produced it.
AI slop floods our feed. News and truth is scattered. Critical thought is atrophying like a muscle nobody is using. Brain rot’s stench is starting to creep into every crevice of human life, and the time is right now to clean this mess up.
This is the juncture. Right here. This uncomfortable, anxious, overstimulated, moment is exactly when creatives are supposed to rise. And not toward perfection, should we aim, but toward truth. Truth is messier, and truth hurts. But that pain is what creates meaning, and no AI could ever Xerox that.
I feel the weight of this moment from the angle of a New Yorker, as a writer, and as a Black American. My city is being sanitized and priced into abstraction. My community is lacking leaders and, we’re just barely holding on to the shards of culture that we have left.
The Glorious Burden
Barack Obama, in his autobiographical Dreams From My Father, speaks of the “glorious burden” that Black Americans hold; the tragedies of our ancestors’ past, and their subsequent triumph, have resulted in gifts of expression and talents for cultural cultivation that we possess today.
“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
And only we can pave the paths, with our human hands and pens and pads and notebooks, along this avenue of special destiny. My hands are ready to work.
What Inspires This Writing?
I’m drawing literary inspiration from Langston Hughes’ Simple projects, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dirt Tracks on a Dust Road and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, among many others as I build this project.
Black America’s literary tradition isn’t ancient history. We’ve been convinced that Black art is something merely of a forgotten time, and that it was just recreational — pretty things you see in a museum that have no connection to today. That’s wrong.
Black art holds deep meaning, yes, but also serves a purpose. Its function is to tell the truth — our truth — painting a clearer picture for the long journey ahead. Black news, art and literature are the torches, and we are the bearers.
The most impactful and integrous of our leaders have been killed, exiled or blacklisted. The literary giants are mostly gone. Culture has a short memory when it’s moving fast and consuming faster — what feels like legacy can start to feel like myth before the ink even dries.
This is where my creative soul has been working, painting these vibrant murals of From the Sidewalk based on my experiences.
The result is what you see here. Snapshots of real, New York moments where deep meaning is lying below the surface. These are cultural, communal and identity-fueled bursts of soul, born from the streets and molded by my mind.
Kendrick said it loud and clear for us: there’s not enough. Not enough people doing the work, putting in the pain, applying the pressure … doing anything … whatever you wanna call it. To document this moment with honesty and intention is the least we can do — and we must.
As a human being who believes, stubbornly, embarrassingly, completely — that the spirit of this species is worth preserving — this stuff has to be written down. The boring, bleak moments that brought us here could be the same ones that save us.
I feel like we keep waiting for the next great figure to arrive. Like they’ll just appear out of thin air. I was guilty of waiting around too — but that’s never how it worked.
The ones we call legends were just good people who decided to put their foot on the gas and keep blazing forward.
Its a burden that is terrifying, lonely and glorious. And I am ready to carry it.
Somebody’s gotta do it.
Want to read more of my street literature?
I published a few back in August, inspired by my church.
This project means the world to me.
But I could really use your help coming up with a permanent name for it.
This writing make me smile