Chicago Poems

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
...

(or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
...

Now a friend of mine, way back in Chicago
You know, he finally made his pile.
Well he got himself a mansion on Butler and Sheff
...

Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,
...

AS I sat alone, by blue Ontario's shore,
As I mused of these mighty days, and of peace return'd, and the dead
that return no more,
...

I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarettes don't smell bad.
...

There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
...

In places like
Selma, Alabama,
Kids say,
In places like
...

I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled--so did I.
He crumpled the skin on his forehead, frowning--so did I.
...

St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
As he passed me on the street.
St. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,
Turned her back on me.
...

O chansons foregoing
You were a seven days' wonder.
When you came out in the magazines
You created considerable stir in Chicago,
...

OF him I love day and night, I dream'd I heard he was dead;
And I dream'd I went where they had buried him I love--but he was not
in that place;
...

In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,
I lay in a garden of such dusky green
It seemed the dregs of the imagination.
Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence
...

SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me!
Hour prophetic--hour resuming the past!
Inflating my throat--you, divine average!
...

1

Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
...

Oh the changing of the seasons it's a pretty thing to see
And though I find this balmy weather pleasin'
...

Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
...

In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
...

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
...

RISE, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer
sweep!
Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour'd what the earth gave
...

I live in Chicago
A very windy city
But tonight I will dance the Chicago samba
Once again
...

in my birthday party an old retired seaman came with his beautiful daughter who is taking care of him since his wife works as a caregiver in Chicago.

he is diabetic, with a high blood pressure and thinks that death shall take him soon. he does not drink Fundador but he obliged, saying life is too short for another happy deprivation.
...

For the most part, in western region of the planet, the smoke and wild fires are gone for 2020, and back east, after much destruction, the hurricaneseason has run its course. We pray that this winter will be less severe.

'Cold' is what I used to experience walking on hardened soil. 'Cold' is what I observed of icicles dripping from roof tops. 'Cold' is what I used to feel while growing up in the deep south.'Cold' was early childhood, being too poor to afford indoor bathrooms,and visits to the outhouse on a cold January night was the only option.
...

a crescent moon
on the Chicago River...
Biden-Harris
in blazing blue letters
...

I felt the heartbeat of a great city
The summer heat the winter ice
A memory made fonder now
As I look back on the how
...

With you,
With, with you,
You,
Only you,
...

Chicago is just like the modern Antarctica with so much extremely cold weather.

Chicago is just like the modern Antarctica and this is not the summer time where people see feathers and hot weather but instead they see snowflakes, ice balls, in the lake, snowballs, and hail this weather is so irrate.
...

He's a bad motherfucker
Johnny Chicago, Johnny Chicago
In the kitchen, at the railway station
Johnny Chicago, Johnny Chicago, Johnny Chicago, Johnny Chicago
...

Words and sounds
gushing out of the
woman's mouth

the woman with the hat

All ears eager and
eyes alert
in the Greyhound
from Chicago to Iowa

"Me don't want them tall buildings,
See, that small house there"
All faces turned that way
"That's what I want."
"Friday evening, leaving home,
reaching Monday morning to work,
Los Angeles to New York -
Many times,
many times over!"

"Too old to work now, ah!
Young enough to live, hee!"
Words hopping to the back seats
as she thrust her face forward
spitting some more words
"Retired? Sacked or fired?"

"Is that Chicago?" Adjusting the
flowers on her hat "I like Chicago!"

Her questions finding
their own answers
or hanging suspended
in the moving bus
upside down

The yellow teeth twittering
Her black wrinkled skin
loosening from her face;

At Iowa City
The next halt
She sprang from her seat
"This city is mine"
declared she,
"I was born here"

As the greyhound
moved away
half an hour later,

with a blanket on one arm
and her basket
hanging on the other,
she was
still standing
on the bus stand
with expectant eyes

waiting for someone
to take her home
where she was born.
...

In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.

But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,
sketched light arch within arch
delicate as fingernail moons.

The green doors should not be locked.
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey.

On the inner green door of the Getty tomb
(a thighbone's throw from your stone)
a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed:
how all living wreathe and insinuate
in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:
ever new birth never rebirth.
Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand.

Sullivan, you had another five years
when your society would give you work.
Thirty years with want crackling in your hands.
Thirty after years with cities
flowering and turning grey in your beard.

All poets are unemployed nowadays.
My country marches in its sleep.
The past structures a heavy mausoleum
hiding its iron frame in masonry.
Men burn like grass
while armies grow.

Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut
of this society you stormed
to be used, screamed
no louder than any other breaking voice.
The waste of a good man
bleeds the future that's come
in Chicago, in flat America,
where the poor still bleed from the teeth,
housed in sewers and filing cabinets,
where prophets may spit into the wind
till anger sleets their eyes shut,
where this house that dances the seasons
and the braid of all living
and the joy of a man making his new good thing
is strange, irrelevant as a meteor,
in Chicago, in flat America
in this year of our burning.
...