Polish Poconos

It’s not Broad and Erie; not Seventeenth and Shunk,
It’s better than your car and anything you got in the trunk.
Take a pile of trash; you take a pile of junk,
Put it all up on a hill and you call it Manayunk...

Old head limericks, complete with big, sweaty High Life quarts,
Little kids with dirt rings, broken Chic-O sticks in their knifed shorts.
Trash-truck juice stained streets, nostrils filled with summer,
Dad’s whistling from the door; game over. bummer.

Massive games of build-up, after the sun has run amuck,
Celestial satellite illuminates white parts of telephone-wire Chucks.
Out with the old, in with the new street type ritual,
Get laughed at big time, if your shirt didn’t fit you well.

If you asked me then, it was the center of the galaxy,
There’s other neighborhoods in Philly? Really? You speak fallacy.
Jallousy windows and ribbed green awnings were our favorite marks,
Throwing Grade A’s, Getting chased by a big Mercury, muffler dragging some sparks.

Manayunk, The Polish Poconos. What’s better? You tell me.
Especially when the objects of boyhood desires, on their feet, wore jellies.
Accompanied by stirrups, Aquanet, and Blow-Pops--a little boy’s confusion.
Kiss them? No. Throw rock at them. Trip on slate sidewalk. Knee contusion.

Now as a grown man, I’m still a little bewildered,
Not what to do with a cute girl; but I’m wondering, is it still her?
There’s still no parking and your sloped face remains the same; there’s no doubt,
But what the hell are these boutiques, Jettas, and sorority girls with big dogs all about?

It’s like it never happened, this childhood that I speak of,
What happens to a neighborhood gentrified?, I never got to get a peek of,
My little kid chasing his sister up Ripka Street, ignoring my dinner calls,
300,000 dollar row homes is what happened, that’s why I live in East Falls.