City Words

1.

Dark water-bright lights streak
City draw-bridge drawn and sings
Orange twisting sirens between

I want to dance with the Chicago River
foxtrot around staring corporate headquarters

feign and duck away from starving veterans

laugh and breath and forget about your dirty dress.

2.

slowly departing commuter trains
passing waiting, rusting freight cars
a billboard streaks between the space
blurred as it is

colors bleed into time
speed hallucinates beauty in distortion

from nothing
shaded hues and my
receding
perspective.

3.

Dreamy quiet on a misty sunray
Monday morning

Soft footsteps ring out in muffled yawns
Tall buildings stretch,
Forlornly droop their weary shoulders

L trains tentatively nudge onto a still sleeping,
Faintly rusting drawbridge
Red in its timidness

The trains glide soothingly
Suspended over dirty bath river water,
Green with melancholy.

4.

Time will never move forward. These pastels will always be my blanket and this picture in my head will remain.

The concrete seemed like it was sinking fast. The Lake was too calm and endlessly wide.

What lake has no shore? How does the thin horizon fade away only to reappear farther away?

The Lake is vast!

Mysteriously, this city full of twilight twinkling yellow lights avoids slipping into the water like suds into a drain. The sky stretches into one shade; overladen with thousands of grays. And I'm sinking.

The world is so lonely in this purgatory of a lakeside park. The empty field. The sea of grass where every single blade steers its own ship. This green swath of a planner's dream battles soundlessly with the foaming river of exhaust pipes and its banks of steel and brick. And the calm, lonely lake on the other side. The middle of night and day over this pasture of lonely lives and old dreams.

Stare at the water. The blue fog of the black depths waits for the solitary.

At the city. The orange globe of security that these tall steel towers project. Whispering promises of old eyes.

Nothing is fair today.

A sailboat chooses for me. A single boat in the unrolling lake, in contrast to the gluttony of the skyline. So alone. How dare the little boat, shouting on deaf ears that it chooses to float slowly into the receding horizon. Its own sunset.

Election Night at the Green Mill

There’s a kind of man that can transform his appearance in the blink of an eye. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been with women who were supposed to have eyes only for me lend theirs to a face that moments before would have only attracted a casual glance. It takes more than a comb and a suite, though. It usually takes an instrument of enhancement, a magical device that can distract inquiring stares from everyman features. Sometimes it takes a Hammond B-3 organ.

We sat at the bar instead of at one of the small tables around the stage. I ordered a Blatz because it felt right. The beer, poured from a dusty brown bottle, tasted like it could have been in a case for twenty years tucked away somewhere in the lounge’s basement, away from prying eyes.

Mary ordered a dry martini. She was dressed for it. She wore a black dress, her wavy chocolate hair thrown in contrast over her pale shoulders. I was dressed appropriately for my expired Blatz - dirty jeans and a brown hooded sweatshirt. We didn’t look like we arrived together, which we hadn’t, but she kissed me when I sat next to her so I guess those who saw figured we were together - even if she looked like she just came from a ball, and I from a grocery store stock room.

When I walked in the bouncer at the door was dressed in black leather and rattled with chains and had scowled at my identification. I had wondered at his bushy gray handlebar mustache in the past, but that night my eyes went immediately to the small tv above a corner of the bar. The election results were still rolling in and a map of the United States was plastered across the screen, checkered in red and blue and the occasional gray.

The place was empty aside from Mary and I, two old men sitting directly under the tv and a few quiet, dark faces scattered around the room. The band members of the organ trio scheduled to play that night were sitting next to the stage smoking cigarettes, talking.

It was a Tuesday. It was November. It was raining outside.

Most everyone in the city was at home peeling of voting stickers and waiting.

The lounge was strange that night. Usually it was hard to find a table or even a place to stand. Empty, everything looked worn out and sad. The lack of smoke somehow stripped the room of its charm, and the absence of body heat made it colder than it should have been. Mary looked out of place when usually I would have been the one that clashed with hipster dresses and black jeans.

Jimmy Smith was somewhere in there - noodling inside the old juke box at the end of the bar. The sound on the tv was turned down, which was just as good since no one at the bar had any desire to listen to the red and blue commentary.

Jazz clubs rarely feel as hopeless as they did that night.

I lit a cigarette for the both of us and we watched the small tv in silence for a while. Mary barely touched her drink and put her hand on my leg.

“How was it,” I finally asked. Mary handed me the cigarette back.

“Boring, I snuck out after they announced she had taken Illinois.”

“Boring,” I laughed, “an election gala boring?”

“For those that wanted to be there it was quite exciting, I suppose.” She sipped her martini and eyed me over the rim. The marks her lipstick left on the glass annoyed me.

The juke box abruptly cut off and we turned towards the stage where the band had finally started to unload their gear. A man in a dull white shirt and wrinkled black slacks yelled to the bar, “Ten minutes Andy, put Jimmy back on.” The bartender, he must have been new, I didn’t recognize him, smiled apologetically and the scratchy juke box faded back in.

Mary stared after the man in the sad clothes as he sat behind his organ and lit another cigarette. “It’s amazing,” Mary said looking away from me, “how bland the man can look before he starts playing.” She turned back to me, then back to the stage. “Remember the first night you brought me here?”

“I do”

“I shouldn’t have been mean to you, Patrick.”

“What do you mean?” She turned back to me again and searched my face. I took a long drag of a fresh cigarette and avoided her eyes.

We were lucky the night Mary was referring to. A table opened up right in front of the stage and we were able to beat another couple to it, laughing about it as we sat down and trying not to look at the angry pair. The same trio was on stage. The same man with the unassuming clothes and the small bird like head and brown moppy hair was behind the organ. Of course he was playing then, in the middle of a solo, so he didn't look the same. He looked like he was in control of the cold, late winter wind blowing outside, and that if he wished he could warm it up and turn it into a spring breeze. He might have, but I wasn’t interested in the weather that night.

I realized how much difference an organ and facial expressions can change a man’s appearance that night.

Mary thought it fun to start teasing me. He looked good behind his instrument, she whispered in my ear. But it was playful. I just smiled and told her to listen for the changes as they started up again. She was going to eye him the whole song and try and get him to slip up. I just smiled, trying to ignore her fun.

He didn’t slip up when he noticed her. He played to her instead, like she was the only woman sitting in the smoky room. He wouldn’t take his eyes off of her. And she strung him along - and me. She lost herself. By the end of the night she wasn’t teasing me anymore, she was teasing the man behind the organ in the red cape. I never let on that i noticed.

“Well,” she said at the bar as she looked up at the election unfolding, “I’m sorry even if you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I didn’t say anything. I tried another sip but gave up on it half way through. I caught the bartender’s attention “Andy, right? You can toss this. Bring me a Guinness when you get a chance.” He emptied the Blatz and started the slow draw.

One of the old men under the tv slapped the bar, stood up and threw his hands triumphantly into the air. I looked from the Guinness up to the tv and Mary squeezed my leg. CNN was calling the election for Madame Larentia.

“Hope,” Mary said next to me in almost a whisper. I turned to her and looked into her brown eyes and she smiled. She looked happy. I hadn’t seen a genuine smile on her face for a long time.

“Hope,” I raised my pint.

The organ trio started to play. Mary looked over her shoulder at the stage for a moment and then turned back to me. The cape was thrown over the bench, around the organ man’s shoulders. But she said, “let’s go home.”

A Call to Quills

Our existence is rusting - bright, silver-chrome hot air balloons and mind control microchips.

Let the borrowed columns crumble and crash. Watch the flaking lead paint within burn - ashes singed and singing, dancing through inverted, city-skyline poisoned air.

Who will cry - or laugh - when it happens?

There are many within these baby-girl imaginary lines that will drink to defeat and a second chance. 300 years is catching up with us. The cotton-strewn, tobacco-smoked road has run out of earth to trample and pave.

Design conforms to function. Ego, jingoism and blind aesthetic – red, white and blue.

The kaleidoscope of plurality is only novelty. Pretty colors dancing in a child’s eye – distracting those that blindly believe in only this one brand of freedom from truly being.

Who has the courage to tear this tower down and build again? Only smaller, striped raw with history and the taste of corporate tyranny.

I call to you! My fresh-watered brethren. It is time for our farsighted big brother to remember us - but not as his complacent purse strings.

I don’t believe in the eagle glides ascending, never descending.

All of their white-wigged, wooden-toothed words are stale but pretty in our ears, only we have forgotten how they were written – with a quill.

I want to believe in that which bred me, but I’d rather believe in those who reared me: you few, lake centric – turn your head, feel the wind, know which way is which by the feeling of deep, cold waters.

We were born clean and bloody, most dirty and smelly, and told to believe that therapeutic, green-papery blankets would comfort and protect our steel-wool scraped bodies.

But let our skin tan, and our wounds heal in the cold lake breeze - free of diseased, gifted blankets.

Waving high, with eyes arrogantly peering into the setting sun. A band-aid rotting on a half healed wound.

We can build with our uncallused hands again. Soul into our souls.

Grow roses, too.

And dance and sing. But not over skulls and broken beds, and blood and blood – over weather-warped junior high school gym floors, holding hands and sober. Close minded and single purposed - gleefully ignorant of the darkness beyond the emergency doors.

And we’ll sing a song of free waters. Clean and true.

Nola the Cat

And Nola the cat found herself in the arms of a large firefighter. New Orleans, Louisiana was under water and Nola was finally out of the oil slicked mess she had been wading through since earlier that day when she saw a bright light at the end of a long tunnel and found herself looking at a world that was not what it had been only hours before. Around her neck, tied to a collar that proclaimed that she was - indeed - Nola the cat, was a sodden piece of wide-ruled notebook paper that had recently been ripped out of an already decaying journal; circa 1979. On it there was a message written in a badly trained hand. It read:

I may be drowned. In the event that I am not, however, I would greatly appreciate if someone would stop by Rue Noyé, # 34 and leave in my possession either a week’s supply of decent red wine, or four bottles of Jameson Whisky. You will be able to find me under the seven inch hole in the westernmost facing section of the roof at said address. Please and Thank You!

- Brian Ivrogne

p.s. Please be good to Nola the cat. She may hiss at you now, but I assure you, she is worth saving.

She was not hissing. In fact, she was actually quite content to be in the large man’s arms, out of the water.

* * *

Bad luck. Brian Ivrogne was house sitting as he watched CNN and saw the glowing, flashing graphics proudly proclaiming that, without commercial interruption, the whole world, or the part that cared, would be able to watch (LIVE!) as New Orleans slowly, but with startling alacrity, succumbed to the rising depths of murky water. He sipped wine and wondered if there was some symbolic importance to the way that Mother nature had chosen this specific location for her grand exposition of power. He mused that maybe she was out to specifically teach the American States a lesson. But, he thought, she had already shown a third-world country a powerful display of wet calamity quite recently with a sneak attack wave in Indonesia. He concluded, while massaging the backside of Nola the cat’s ears, that she didn’t really care about America or tropical third-world countries - she didn’t really care about anything at all.

Useless musings aside, there was a reason why Brian found himself in the awkward position of stranded castaway on his own family’s property with only Nola the cat for company. His mother, a native daughter of New Orleans had recently moved into her childhood home at Rue Noyé, # 34 because her mother, Brian’s grandmother, had finally given into science’s insistence that she should have been dead a long time ago due to her constant indulgence in good red wines and Newport 100’s. Ms. Ivorgne was floating along anyway and so decided to make a new life where she first attempted the act of living in the first place. She was allowed this floating lifestyle because her former husband, Brian’s former father, was a well respected meteorologist in the great city of San Diego. Along with respect came money, or maybe respect came because of money; the point being that both Ms. Ivorgne and Brian had little to worry about in matters of finance. Alas, Brian’s mother was much like her own mother and enjoyed a good red wine - she did, however, smoke Parliament Lights exclusively. Fortunately, well, not so fortunate for Brian as it turned out, his mother had learned the lesson of her mother’s premature death and admitted herself, with many a blessing from Brian and Nola the cat into a rehab clinic in Atlanta. Brian, having nothing better to do, set out for New Orleans to keep an eye on his mother’s childhood home and his grandmother’s aging cat, Nola.

The actual hurricane was not as spectacular as Brian had expected. Nola the cat on the other hand, was very impressed and hid under a couch through most of the storm. Brian merely sat in the closest corner of the house facing the storm sipping his grandmother’s good red wine because he was trained to do so in the event of a tornado back in his hometown elementary school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Tornadoes and Hurricanes couldn’t be that dissimilar, he thought. The next morning, after coaxing Nola the cat out from under the couch he checked the phone lines and the TV and found that no power was being issued from the local power plant. With nothing else to do he climbed into the attic, stopping at the foot of the stairs to rummage through his grandmother’s wine boxes, blindly groping for a fresh bottle. Nola joined him after awhile, and he began rummaging through his grandmother’s exiled possessions.

There was also a fine collection of memorabilia from his mother’s childhood. An old wooden chest, propped up on an ancient, rusting sowing machine contained many artifacts from his mother’s past. He found, in particular, a journal from her sophomore year in high school. Turning the pages he encountered a rather monumental entry concerning both his existence and his mother’s current state of mind. Dated September 14^th, 1979 his mother wrote:

A senior asked me to homecoming today! Billy Vaniteux! He is soo cute. He runs track and is a DJ for the school radio station.

His former father’s surname was illuminated like a squashed bug on a windshield as he scanned the pages of her journal. He once shared the surname, actually, but he had recently adopted his mother’s maiden name since he felt no affinity with the meteorologist who left them in Chicago for a job in San Diego.

Although Brian’s grandmother was a very accomplished drinker, he was saddened to find that her makeshift wine cellar at the bottom of the stairs was quite barren when he retreated down for another new bottle. He reasoned that his mother had something to do with its fruitlessness. There was only enough wine to last him a couple of days at the most. He continued to read through his mother’s journal as Nola the cat explored the previously uncharted territory of the attic.

Hours drifted by. As Brian learned further details of his parents’ high school courtship, Nola was surprised to find that the entrance to the attic - a foldable ladder attached to the ceiling of the second floor - was quickly becoming submerged in distasteful green water. She was alarmed of course but thought nothing was seriously the matter since the actual floor of the attic was still dry and continued her survey. Soon enough, though, the water crested above the entrance’s threshold and Nola was forced to seriously wonder about their predicament. Brian, on the other hand, was just finishing one of the twelve or so bottles left untouched by his mother. He hadn’t noticed the rising water since he was sitting on an old wood dresser, flaking white paint, with his feet above the attic floor.

Nola the cat jumped on Brian’s lap. He peered into the empty wine bottle as a kid would peer into a kaleidoscope. He stroked Nola’s grey coat and as he was like to do lifted the cat’s front paw to feel the rough skin under her clawless appendages. He felt a damp paw where he expected to feel a dry paw. He adjusted his already blurry eyesight from Nola’s damp paw to the attic’s floor and was astonished to find that there was at least an inch of water below his dangling toes. He hopped from his wondering perch above the flaking dresser and splashed haphazardly over to the hole in the floor where the second floor ladder met the attic.

Bad luck. Even as Brian tried to focus his eyesight into the murky depths of what was once a relatively dry, if not moldy, second floor he noticed that the water that had recently begun to seep through the floor boards had risen almost another inch since he had lumbered his way over to where his exit should have been. Like a floundering submarine, his grandmother’s attic had become a most uncomfortable and inhospitable place. He had been in the attic before, years before, but he was not familiar with its layout and, like Nola the cat before him, he began to survey the lay of his quite suddenly sodden land. He found that there was only one window and it was much too small for any regular sized human to shimmy through. The water rose.

Eventually Brian, with Nola the cat’s insistence, decided that they should at the very least construct some sort of safe haven above the rapidly rising water. He enlisted the help of an old rocking chair and set it on top of the dresser he had been perched upon pondering his mother’s adolescence. He stationed close at hand the remaining bottles of wine that had casually and seemingly jubilantly floated up from the floor below and his mother’s journal. The water continued to rise at an alarming rate but as night fell it finally began to level out. The foul smelling water was just about above Brian’s ankles at this point as he sat rocking back and forth sipping his grandmother’s good red wine. Nola the cat sat purring on his lap. As happens, sleep overtook the two.

Nola the cat woke up first. The water, although rising slowly at this point was, quite to the dismay of Brian, still rising and it was now just below Brian’s knees. After uncorking another bottle of wine with the cork screw he had resourcefully kept in his pocket the day before, he noticed an annoying beam of sunlight from overhead as he tipped his head back to allow the warm wine to trickle down the back of his throat. Nola the cat was sick of being stuck on Brian’s lap by this point and was beginning to feel rather anxious to be outside, away from the murky green water and Brian’s hot, wine-tainted breath. She also noticed the beam of sunlight from above and attempted to climb on top of Brian’s head to discover the source of its intrusion. To both of their surprise they found that there was an old ventilation shaft jutting from the part of the roof just above their heads. They had not noticed it the night before because there was no light above them to beckon their eyes to its location above their island of shrouded candle light.

Brian had no chance to squeeze through. The hole was only seven inches wide at the most. There was wine to last him a couple days - no food, but he figured that wine, especially red wine, must have some sort of nutritional value. As Nola the cat kept insisting that something be done to save her, Brian found his mother’s revealing journal on top of the chest next to the wine he had rationed the night before just barely above the slowly rising water. With a pen he fished out of his cargo pocket he scribbled a note on the back of an entry concerning his father’s kissing prowess. He figured there were others in more dire need of rescue then him. His situation was rather stable. He desired only the necessities, which he carefully requested in bad hand writing on the back of his own symbolic conception. Nola the cat easily slid through the ventilation shaft.

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