Zika park

Underneath the tangle of interstate highway (that eighth wonder, its unstoppable tide of cars surging like electricity through the neuronic, moronic brain of capital) Zika park Zika park Beneath the blind rush, the Olympian pillars, the titanic girders Amidst industrial debris and hundreds of lost shoes Zika park Zika park Invisible to satellites and the low-flying planes of our planet’s cartographically inclined Internet robber barons Zika park Because something strange happened after Eisenhower dreamed those massive pillars and girders You see, they Accidentally built a wholly new world, a negative space Like an enormous sheets-and pillows-fort That transformed the living room into a secret universe adults could not enter, Or even see. Zika park Zika park And deep in this secret world built by the hands of completely unorganized And random group of kids whose slogan is (As it always has been) Skateboarding is not a crime! Boys and girls dragging tons of concrete in, Hammering together wood reclaimed from dirt piles and the wasteland around the fetid river Framing ramps and sculpting bowls Abandoned shopping carts piled full of spray paint And then they gathered in Zika park And then it began The endless Ollie, the forever jump across the synapse Between one slope and another. They call it Zika park in honor of a previous pandemic Carried by the quintillions of mosquitoes that hatch and rise Day after day in the garbageland streams and the cinderblock ruins They come in on foot, or drive the forgotten railroad tracks And build more. And skate more. And build more. And so Zika park even if I gave you the coordinates, You would never find it You would travel the superhighway in increasingly angry circles, from exit to exit And proclaim the thing a fake, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes Zika Park. And all of it, every ton of this spontaneous joy, every scrape of the deck and every wheel rolling fire-fast Across the pavement, every punk and rap anthem ever written, Every first beer every first toke every tattoo every young body that ever gathered in a sea of young bodies, every all-night party, every proud scar, every dream Is dreamed by kids and carried on, in the secret world Forever and ever, world and party and ramp without end At Zika park