ALL TENANTS ARE SCUM

by David Susswein

Grenfell Tower before the fire. Image source: Blueprint Printing.

I pasted aluminium and sparked diamonds
upon a crow of dirty concrete slabs
my followers know
I made their sight beautiful;

inside cockroaches leaped and prayed in their ways,
darkness, as they had their dirty sex, and bred

their roach mothers scrawl-scrubbed their children
clean of
black, darker skins
make them whiter white, right for our times

those scum dislike water
and won’t buy expensive organic food.

I hand pick cereal flowers for my kids
kiss them in milk hand-picked cows
glower them in precious Branded clothes
I drive a Bugatti, and always will.

Tenants in [Jared] Kushner’s East Village buildings . . . have often complained about lack of services. In April, residents of 118 East 4th Street, after five months spent with a garbage mountain in their backyard and with no cooking gas, won a court settlement in which [Kushner’s management company] Westminster agreed to make repairs, give rent-stabilized tenants 60 percent off their rent for the time without gas and market-rate tenants 30 percent off, and cover the tenants’ legal fees. —The Village Voice, January 12,