My Old Friend Robert Kills My Great Aunt Pearl

I wake to a gunshot.

I lay my head back onto my pillow, roll over with a handful of blanket and hide my back from the sun framed window—close my eyes.

It is that hazy time in the morning when it is hard to tell if dreams persist.

I am rolling down my back stairs. Instead of crashing to the ground, I am standing upright, looking back up into a brightly lit entrance. It is dark where I am on the landing. My great aunt Pearl’s silhouette is standing above me in the doorway. Like a demon angel. She starts to float down the stairs towards me. I clench my fists. They feel small and raw. My heart tries to jump out of my mouth. Then, quickening gelatin.

I wake to another gunshot.

I rub my eyes, crust crumbling in my fingers. My great aunt Pearl’s floating silhouette is still suspended before me—slowly melting away. The silhouette becomes a shadow. Then it is gone, and so is the memory.

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth is the only reminder of fear.

I fall back down onto my pillow, sighing. I am glad it is morning and I did not wake in the middle of the night.

Another gunshot.

I roll over and close my eyes again, sure that the morning light will shelter me from more great-aunt-Pearls. The blanket is on the ground now, so I pull a wrinkled corner of sheet up around my head.

I am running. Slowly. But I am winning the race. I can see the finish line but no one is there cheering. My feet look like clown feet when I glance down. I look up. I am crouching at a starting block. I do not remember running a moment before. I have on a cheap green t-shirt that says Essex Grade School in black, block lettering. I look to my left. My friend Robert smiles back—his face is familiar but hazy. His teeth are very white. The starter raises his pistol.

I wake to another gunshot.

I moan and throw the sheet onto the ground. I sit on the side of my bed and look at my bedside alarm clock. It is nine twenty-three. The park across the street from my apartment was covered in snow when I moved in. I had had no idea that underneath was a public high school track.

I walk though my bedroom with heavy feet, then my living room scratching, and yawn into my kitchen. I stare out my window as another gunshot rings out. And I watch two skinny kids break away from the others. They are wearing the same jersey. It is not green and the kids are in high school. Still, I smile. I remember Robert.

And forget about my great aunt Pearl.

Albany Park Sunshine

Talking about Albany Park sunshine flying through these dirty windows in the afternoon. I can’t seem to place the extra space, the dust gliding along over stairs and around stares. It reminds me of summer, spring buds bloomin’. Here I go dancing around the in, the between but never stepping forward only down or side stepping around.

Crusty cold, bright snow. Smiles. Resting hands, the back of his head. Leaning back with a frown.

Three squat houses looking back across the street at me and the mind I see. It’s projected, lobbing volleys arching over three flats, directly in my line of sight. I can’t tell what those three are planning, I’m caught in their allies cross fire. I know their alleys, luckily. I have friends coming over the river, they heard my franticly wandering blinking eyes, and the smack smack – smack – clack kak, of my morose code.

To the rescue, countering feigning beams intercepted and inverted by clever brick keystones, they run and charge and scream. Let him be! Let him be!

Let me be! Let me be!

Rally, rally, push back, punch and kick. We have the smirking, cosmic seeing sight on the ropes. Around its neck and make it choke. Down, beat back, the end of time, make it dark so it can rest.

Wave our colors. Flap, flap. Victory over destiny, fortitude against click and the tock, tick. Destiny, destiny, you make time stick.

Victory, victory, wave our standard, fly it high, we have fate in numbers and our backs turned against your wide, wide eyes.

Sublime rest, the clock rolls over under blankets and ticks and tocks turn to sighs and snores.

Oh, snore some more.

Sal[vation]

Sal opened the letter. He read it slowly. It was the second such letter he had received. He put the letter down on the counter.

rusting by resting
words already dusting
into silent still
air

meaning is bleeding
wounds already healing
slowly sowing a
stare

Turning to the stove, Sal turned off the kettle. The steam climbed to the low ceiling and spread like an inverted flood. He stared through the fog. Minutes passed and he began to sweat from the shrouding steam. The kitchen was small.

Half Mast Revolution Blues

pardon our dusk

under reconstruction

A toast to the new year and a changing climate.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness [...] But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Are we there yet? Maybe not.

That's the beauty of America - America can change.
-BHO

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.”