What is the ghetto?
A place where a young man with a basketball jones bounces into a police station
and starts shooting.
Where a man walks into a bank with a gun and starts withdrawing
lives and depositing them with their maker.
Where children will get their first gun long before their first car.
Where some cops are bad or is it some bad people become cops.
Where the Rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire is heard all day.
Where police are called to elementary schools for violent children with guns.
There are more liquor stores than churches.
Where a 40 ounce and E & J is the drink of choice.
Can't afford a big bottle they made half pints just for you.
Motherfucker and nigger are every day words and have no particular meaning.
Where the young grow up with drugs dealers as mentors.
Neighborhoods ruled by Mobocracy.
Crack houses, weed houses, smoke houses on every block.
Where sex is available for five dollars.
A loose cigarette sells for thirty five cents.
Here you grow up fast and hard among burned and abandoned houses of despair.
Some will make it out walking...some in a box...and some will always stay there.
You see...It's Home!!!
August 14, 2000
“Understanding is voluntary. Ignorance is a given.” — Jimmy j
Jim Janas wrote from Detroit’s East Side — poems, quotes, and a near-daily journal — and published all of it on ghettovoices.com from 2000 until 2010. He signed nearly every entry the same way: Love, Jimmy. The site went dark years ago. This is its memorial: everything the Internet Archive preserved, recovered and restored.