It dripped down the streets like molasses, slow, filling my taste buds with the smells of fried foods and burnt sugar, beckoning me into little shop windows on corner stores, black men in Kangol caps like sentinels of the gates of heaven, perched on brick stoops, guarding the treasures of their old city, block by block, bit into by white mouths hungry for someone else’s experience to shape their own borders in a dull life, when dull seems more like a luxury than a shackled lifestyle and I look into these eyes, into black pits where whole generations lay steeped in a hand against the back of their heads or a rhythm in their bones, or a slow living with little to give, where the weight of a gift falls heavy, but is given without want of admiration or gold, and into those centuries I do not reach, but whisper, “I am not here to fix, or change, or become you. I am here simply for the sweet molasses that drips slowly down your streets, and I thank you for that weighted gift you know not that you give.”