Joseph Balletti

The Goddess of Wealth Joseph Balletti

People were living in plastic bags and cardboard boxes filled with used needles, crack vials and broken bottles. They wandered in hopeless circles dressed in filthy rags, dumped out of mental hospitals to bail out banks. The streets are paved with shit-smeared gold. The dead television light of Reagan's Morning in America was not worth waking up for. This was the place that Daisy and I came to after our college of parties, mansions and gardens. New York City, Lower East Side, late 1980s: brutal and in your face, but it had its certain allure. Hammer of the gods. When I looked around this is what I saw...ghetto kids, malcontents, and misfits, caught between love and hate; caught between life and death. Lost sheep bearing the teeth of starving wolves. Illiterate street poets writing love poems on their arms with dirty needles. They sensed some hidden god's judgment but kept the demons in plain sight.