Having misjudged my rations I ran out of food two days before my move out of town. So, just before sundown I headed down to the ghetto grocery store. The weather has warmed up to spring temperatures and murder is on the rise again, a middle-aged Greek man gunned down just before 5 a.m. on Eastern Avenue, the ghetto hawk high in the sky as I headed down Harford Road.

I crossed the road to the west side just above Bayonne, where crime is rife, and headed down the sidewalk.

Crossing Bayonne I noticed a Reparations Recovery Agency sitting on the stairs of the government building, mostly obscured behind the wall, only able to see people passing on the sidewalk from north to south.

As soon as I passed I heard him speak into his smart phone—“Comin’ up on yo.”

Crossing Evergreen—the prime location for making mugging targets in this neighborhood, where I have been threatened numerous times—a driver is loading stationary from his paper company truck onto a dolly to my left in the gutter. To the right, on the flanking church stairs, stood a bantamweight youth with his bike. As he eyes me closely he is more white, more pale than I, but based on his afro, I suppose he identifies as black. He makes a hand sign to an unseen person behind him as I approach.

As I pass he shuffles nervously, puts one hand on his bike handle and slides his right hand under his oversized white T-shirt into the pocket of his black cargo shorts.

Behind the wall of the church stair, under the shade of a tree, two dark-skinned thug youth are pulling their hoods over their heads, focusing their small eyes intensely on me as they step towards me in crouching postures out from their bikes [parked in a good getaway alley between the commercial strip and the church], but suddenly brake in their tracks as I slide my thumb under my jacket and palm the base of my clip knife. Their caper ruined by an alert quarry, they step back into their ambush position as the driver, now five paces to my rear, rolls down the door of his truck and goes about his work, apparently none-the-wiser that his truck was being used as cover for a sidewalk ambush.

I stopped at Brennen's for a draft on the way home, and as I downed that stretched my hip so it would not catch as I stood before the bar. By 6:15 I was headed up the road, the sun barely streaking the filthy buildings as I stopped very 50 paces to do a slow 360 degree scan for pursuit. Lazy and fearful, the people who hunt us rarely fail to disappoint once we devolve 10,000 years in the moment of their predatory failure.

As I type this at 7:45 p.m., police sirens, whining dirt bikes, fire sirens and chopper blades pierce the dirty, Baltimore sky, drowning out the true filth that shuffles along it's streets, scurrying across the sterile carcass of this deservedly dying civilization.