0 Cedar Avenue

Your many potholes and homeless people I have
counted. Your broken windows decorating buildings
and sidewalks dressed in graffiti I have studied.
Your thieves selling stolen car rims I have avoided.
I would say that you are ugly but I have seen you
in the rain. Headlights and stoplights reflecting off
your wet concrete. Turning dark coal into a shimmering
diamond that illuminates the trail of mist left by cars.
Oh you too have been roughed up, but still you hold up
your street signs, still you let outcasts express themselves,
still you are neglected by those in charge, and still you comfort
those without hope as they time and again walk all over you.
Through pairs of worn out shoes, through the pains
of life, along this damaged street, I have grown.

--Cristopher T., 18