Robotic

in the inner city, by Lucille Clifton

in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights
and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or like we call it
home

No, none of these words--not even the title--is supposed to be capitalized. Yes, it pained me to type the whole thing out without touching the caps lock key. It's a very peculiar thing, to read something like this without capitalization or punctuation; it goes beyond childish scrambles of thoughts, but offers a very robotic (in my head, at least) change in tone that I'm not used to reading in. Capitalization, for example, adds some sort of human depth to the poem...maybe a definite beginning? And punctuation does the opposite; it offers a definite end. If you strip this away from a sentence, it just feels like a run-on phrase (in fact, it is a run-on phrase) that goes on forever and ever. The poet epitomizes this by ending the poem with the beginning lines. When I finished reading the poem aloud, my voice had automatically prepped itself for more words, more phrases, but it sadly found none. The poem simply...stops. There is no beginning nor end. It just is. 

And that brings me to the chilling tone of the poem itself. By taking away such human inflections implied in capitalization and punctuation, my inner voice reads this poem in a robotic, detached, monotone voice. The odd breaks between phrases contributes to the static, cut-and-dry feeling of the poem. I keep imagining a robot reading this, but trying to read it with human emotion (and doing so unsuccessfully, of course). Whenever the robot gets an emotional groove going, he seems to stop himself, not sure what to say next, and then stammers out the rest of the phrase. It's like an uncomfortable tick tick...tick tick tick...tick method of speaking, like a Morse code that no one quite understands.

And that was just me ranting on about the tone. The content itself is a whole other monster to conquer. If the tone depicts a creepy detachment and robotic lifelessness, then the content that follows will follow, either in an ironic or dreadfully accurate manner. Sadly, it's a mixture of both. I'm not sure I quite understand the significance of "inner" city as opposed to just "city," but I definitely see the irony in calling a city their "home." Despite personalizing a city as a place of dwelling and warmth, the houses are compared as standing as "straight as/ dead men." Combined with the awkward break between the phrase, it gives a sense that the simile used was hesitant, or accidental. Using the robot metaphor once again, it seems as if the robot is trying to find the most accurate description of its visual input; claiming that it's similar to "dead men" gives me the creepy vibe that this speaker has seen rows of dead men before. And if he hasn't, the implications of "dead men" completely negate the house-warming effects of "home." In a place of living, the speaker connects its with death and maybe even infertility (since he only mentions men).

The speaker continues this ironic contrast by "hanging on to our no place," yet "happy to be alive." Despite claiming a home, he has a "no place," and he's oddly "hanging" from it like a hangman game. Through it all, he has to plaster on a facade of happiness throughout the ordeal, or at least try to act happy in the given situation. These lines again dehumanize the speaker, as if he doesn't know any better but to be happy to "hang on to a no place." It's eerie! And finally, the last three lines repeat the first three, ending the poem with an incomplete thought. There appears to be no end to this type of lifestyle, this robotic functioning of living in the city. Homes are compared to dead people, happiness is compared to loneliness, and it all spirals in a circle to who-knows-where.