Monday, November 5, 2007

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.