Chicago Poem #45

Brother and Sister kept, check
Family in the suburbs
Family in the retail shops
Stiff winds wound up; always movement
Putting on that Renaissance mask
Pretending another much needed rebirth,
Native sons grow up and move out.

I looked up pictures of you
on the internet
from the Forties, Fifties and Sixties
Those won't matter much longer.
They are scenes from a movie made
twenty years later doesn't matter anymore.
Those cars were beasts and it is all too bad we destroyed.

Chicago Poem #28

A trailblazer and a felon
walk into a large building
towards a bank of elevators
and wait for the next car
going up.

Breezing past them,
in a plaid sport coat
is a Quiet American
with an appointment to keep.

A muted shuffling rush of humanity and...

There is only room for two men
on the next car going up.

What happens is an overreaching
respect for authority
mixes with a genuine loathing
of anything but the self.
No one will enter the next car.
No one was sent.

The doors close,
three men stand near the bank of elevators.
And the city moves forward,
educating its young kings
to clamor to be sent,
to be wanted.
To wear and where and wear.

Chicago Poem #47

I could go just to hear:
the funny way the barmaid asks us
"What's you guys' story?"
The fact that teenagers I once knew
now own bungalows and brownstones
Just to see:
The light switch for the dartboard
put in a wiseguy location
six feet up a wall
with a sloppy paint job
The daily utterance
"just let me get offa work"
The daily plea
"where's my piece?"
Daily, this place was dirty snow
and walking uphill both ways
winds that turned the corner
to frostbite your lips
Your dry lips that spit
"just let me get outta this city"
Never, ever could escape
It closed up around my ankles,
my knees, my thighs, my right hand,
my left hand, my hat.

Chicago Poem #1

I wonder how many sandwiches
Slid down the counter
in the midst of a conversation
That meant the birth of a child,
the loser meeting the winner,
the beginning of a job,
the end of a career.

I think of Studs
combing back his hair in the mirror.
I wonder what he preferred.
Italian beef, Turkey, an all beef hot dog.
Maybe a taco or a latke, instead.
Was he on the wall at Manny's Deli
with Jim McMahon? Nah.
He had more important things to do.

I imagine the best sandwich Studs ever ate
was served to him
in a simple apartment,
smoke from a cigarette hanging in the air
with the static of the tape rolling,
by a tough-handed woman
on stale bread, with a bit of government cheese
maybe some bologna and bright yellow mustard
And he savored its separate parts quietly
as she told him everything.

Chicago Poem #44

So, we change the poem.

Fall to our knees,
stay up too late, take the fifth.
Chicago holds you in its memory
while a slaugtherhouse in Iowa
files for bankruptcy.
There is more work for you,
I will spirit,
now that you have volunteered.

So we change the poem:
Tonight, Division Street is united.

Chicago Poem #46

They lost again.
And after all of that.
We pinned so much
hope, prized possessions, plastic googaw -
Remember that Ernie
never even tasted
the chilly, sweet dusk
on an October field
Under bright lights.
(The want is more/contains more)
Never heard the release
of a bellow and a linsky
like Novembers
that promise
to be
everything.

Yeah. You can call me Joe.