Gentricide

BLOG POST posted on March 18, 2011 by Joseph Jones

Gentricide

let me manufacture new language
for the same old displacement

absentee land speculators
team up their mouthpieces
with a brigade of daytrippers
foolish footsoldiers
always the enthusiastic
know-too-little youth

all out to revitalize
Chinatown in Vancouver
where parking-garage monuments
stand from the last incursion

a beholden city council
opens the campaign
desperate to develop
at the eleventh hour
their fallback strategy
to sever the situation
pick off at least one piece
within the target perimeter
under the current mandate
do some payback

say the streets are empty
claim no one can thrive
but insist that entrepreneurs always will
prepare to disappear unwanted classes
the poor the old the immigrant
not to mention the aboriginal third
who never left their own land

a dying ocean of acid
global capital keeps on eating away
ready to corrode any perceived safe haven

in the ghetto
pushed to the last alternative
bodies will fill the streets

* * *

Joseph Jones on the occasion of the opening day of public hearing on
Chinatown Height Review, Vancouver City Council, 17 March 2011