Tell me if this is a nihilistic view of the city I claim to love. I wrote a poem about life in the Philly ghetto, and it's more or less a commentary on how dangerous this city's getting.

Lamentations on Urban Life

Loafing about on unsettling avenues
The asphalt yawns with desire to swallow me
Cajoling me into its black sterile essence.
I wander around this infinite city and I smell the air
It reeks of a sullen anonymity
This dirty, rundown, rusty, dank
Mobius Strip of wanton yearning
Spins tales of ennui from faceless visages
Who stand by their mantra that this is our home
Where bullets soar like pure, liberal sparrows
Where stray dogs patrol on behalf of their ids
Where obscenity is touted as irrefutable dogma
Eventually you become one of “those people”
Mere wayfarers of the urban labyrinth
Lost in a place in which its symbolic Minotaur--
An amalgam of debris and unresolved plights
Roams to eclipse what is left of the light.

Three hundred sixty three victims at the epoch of my tale
The number clangs in my head, paranoia follows suit
My butterfly knife grasped firmly in hand, quivering
Trembling in its own wish to dig beneath the skin
To await the bath of blood it is destined to receive
To protect me from my own desperate brothers
Who seek to spill my blood ere I can spill theirs.