This is a poem about a neighborhood changing for the better and the worse.

I can’t tell you when it started
but I can say when it was over:
too fast.
 
when hundred year old houses
were torn down to make way
for what looks like cardboard boxes
 
when Mark tells me
the record shop closed down
so they could sell artisanal IPAs
 
when you see more overpriced lox 
than salmon at the locks
shipped in from far off seas
 
That's when you know.
 
cause B didn’t always stand for $10 beer
and love didn’t always stand for lost
to someone else’s pretty thoughts

when playgrounds turn to condos
fade into realtor signs

even the shittiest house on the block is fixed up, 
now
with a price tag of 1.5 mil.

take your hipster flannel
and five dispos per block
I can never go home,
because you turned it into yours.

Process

I often think about how much my childhood neighborhood has changed, like when I see friends not from the city talking about how much they want to go there, when my whole childhood, nobody ever did. This poem is directed at the new residents of the neighborhood, who have formed it into something completely different, to remind them of what was there before, and what will eventually disappear again.