she tastes like the real thing

today i ate lunch outside with an old new friend. we talked about art, my mother, fulbrights, los angeles, japeth mennes, graduate schools, and detroit. we took a drive in his car to highland park, where there isn't enough money to hire its own police force, where people steal the manhole covers for scrap metal, where big concrete road blocks block roads so people don't just dump things there. useless roads, since there is no one living there. there are weeds taller than me, wild dogs, caved in roofs. my old new friend took me to houses he painted orange with his old friends. orange objects. they are still there because the town/city/idea of highland park cannot afford to demolish them. the idea of highland park cannot afford anything. i peered into an open manhole and it was about six feet deep. nothing as exciting as a river of slime, although there may as well be. the people we passed looked grumpy and tired. in front of an orange house, if you can call an object with trees growing inside and no roof and no family and no anything a house, there was a streetlight with a long vertical stripe of orange paint. i motioned to my old new friend and he laughed and mentioned the night they painted, one of the four was fairly intoxicated. the lights don't work, but i liked the streak of orange. demolish this too it says. nothing here works it yells. you can do better than this it beckons. i wonder if joe biden went to highland park today. if he saw the orange and the wild dogs and the tired faces. i wonder if he saw my face, which is still slightly confused about what i saw and what i plan to write about and if i think change can actually happen. what do you think joe? do you think electric hybridness is going to change detroit? are we in for a surprise? there is no reverse. first turn back on the lights and cover the manholes and then we'll talk hybrid.