Poem: Chicago

Wrote this years ago, and just rediscovered it. Merry Christmas.

Part One

The bodies bump and tussle in the night

Slick with youth's yawning focused poet's love

Sharp like a fresh wound that time will soon heal

The non-voyeur buries his skull in deep sand

Searching for an answer quick and easy

Midnight is long past, yet day is remembered

The orange sky autumn's lovely tragedy

Halloween christening my child's heart

Romancing in the mind and lonely hand

Beset by meager slivers of souls

Sweet of breast and soft of throat but doe-eyed

Why should a beggar get to choose?

Who has crowned him king and judge?

Righteous and worthy are we in our eyes

Never afraid of bustling crowds

Never lacking in charisma or character

Never cloaked in silhouette and subway grime

Never making dangerous eyes out of steamy windows

Never shying from the mutant glow of the street lights

But always passing hours in derelict hideaways

Always lingering at blue notes ripe with jazz

Always pushing past the mangy harlequins on Addison

Always leaning in a corner with no way out

Part Two

Yet hope was handed to me by trembling strings

Stretched out across waving amber expanses

I shook slender hand and bid her come

Well-met we were at Navy Pier

Walking shoulder to shoulder along the Rhineland

Fertile with jagged glass and cigarette butts

Smiled we did at life's eccentricities

I played the gentle heart's part with abandon

Watery-eyed and mistletoed, murmuring and glancing

Beholding waifs with windy worried expressions

Kissed by a bubbling insatiate thirst

The city noise was a chorus song sung sweet

Beneath the citadels gothic and zebra-striped

I left the smoldering wreck of my foundation

Retreated I did to sit at Ignatius' noble feet

Long-thought solitude bestowed upon me once more

There I sowed a saccharine construction

When snow began to fall, I went for the El train

My hands were cupped as we passed the boneyard

Strewn with dilapidated hulks ravaged and decimated

So soon would there be light

When Helios warmed my reptile blood

My choice had been made

Part Three

The train station looms ahead, vast and empty

Electric blues spark, cackle, and move ahead

Yet one remains entrenched in murky recesses

Staring downward at a sticky concrete floor:

A vaudeville theater and a gout-stricken man

An angular oddball with a penchant for polish sausage

Two Russians with bulbous eyes and a lisping delivery

They speak of European girls and communist fatalities

Ivy-grown stone under neighborhood villas

The crack of Kentucky wood hammering a homerun

Crowds draining from the coliseum and into the bar-filled streets

Stacked with memorabilia of beloved losers

That time in Chinatown, searching for the golden pig

Finding plastic toys and foreign language comic books

Paying for over-priced, salted-down chow mein.

He rode the El downtown in the twilight

Red lines streaking past tenement houses cold and drafty

Mexicans living Spanish in front of the whole wide world

Water lapping against the lonesome pier, beneath the moon

Jogging between suits and spiked-hair and bums

Fat, fetid, and filthy, eating trash, pillaging cans

Under the bridge beneath the Tower of Babel, a deserted night-town

This was my playground and I shall miss it.