These are a few wordworks of mine rescued from the dustbin of history. They were written for another blog I had for a while when I lived in East Rogers Park, a racially integrated area of Chicago. The pieces were written from 2011-2013. I hope you like them. Shrug.
BODICE RIPPER
Esther is Jewish,
The People of the Book.
She has dementia,
never stops talking gibberish.
Apparently in her day she was
an avid reader, it was all she did.
Yesterday she was sitting
in her wheelchair in the
activities room of the
assisted living facility
I work at and she was reaching
across to try and grab a romance novel
from the table in front of her.
So I went to hand it to her and she looked confused
Not taking it from me initially
I smiled and asked her if she wanted it.
She squinted and smiled weakly in confusion,
said yes and took it from me.
I went off to help other people out
for a while ducking and diving
here there everywhere and nowhere
as you do in that busy environment.
When I came back later on into the room,
she had taken the book and torn it into pieces
throwing them on the floor all around her chair.
And as I sighed sadly and picked them up
to consign them to the dustbin of literary history
I thought well, Esther's days of
romancing and reading are
definitely long gone
forever.
THE END
FRIDAY TIGHT
Hamilton's Bar
Corner of N Broadway
and educational drunkenness
Early in the night
a half-hundred empty seats
patiently awaiting a
thousand boozelubed
drunken Friday evening
dreams to be
Various ages
Various dipsomaniac stages
Excited promising sound
of the dancestorm
beginning slowbuilding
Back bar open
Soon dozens of partiers
Hoping of hopping on a pleasure bus to
nowhere but
Back and forth and up and down
A million TV jetsets
broadcasting unintelligible
various sporting
screams from the ceiling
of little sensible but
the scores of college
basketball or nothing at all
Currently underemployed
whitetop waitresses wait distressed
and circle and stalk like
tip-starved great whites
Fresh flash of college flesh
Flush and gush of beertap
Watching idly the passersby
Scotland-similar
archetypes arty types
partytypes legpartertypes
The night is young
The night is well hung
between daycrowd and
nightshift ready to clock
in and sing and swing and
raise a glass to the
University of Life in passing
sensurround and another round
and round and about and
Mine's a Guinness
Cheers
Slainte.
THE END
FURBLUR
I can see a couple of wee squirrels from where I am sitting. Chicago is squirrel central. Seen them eat anything from old cold pizza to chicken Mcnuggets; they're not fussy or healthy eaters, hell no! I love that lolloping galloping archback run they have, the wee black eyes in the brown face, scamper, scuttle, white-and-brown tailflick, forage, sniff sniff sniff ground, stop, wait, alert, sense something in the air, look round, listen to the wind, hear a sound, fly off up a tree or into a garden never to be seen again.
THE END
LOYOLA PARK AND
RIDE THE FUTURE
Sand is defrosted soft underfoot for the first time this year. Slight nippy
wind. Artery-flowing tidewasher lake is light khaki moving in gradients to jade
on the crisp in-focus horizon. Sand soft and pliable, unlike earlier this year
with ice visible under slowly blowing-away grains, landtrapped iceberg in a
fake cold winter desert. Random crisscross of meaningless telltale tracks, dog
and gull and human. Looking left alng the beach or lakebank it could be
anywhere, Tangier to Marbella to undercover Chicago faroff slow suburb storm.
The constant wavewash slaplap is relaxing white H2O noise. White plastic
product bucket of some kind on stones near water's choppy uneven edge. Coldish
wind whistling on half-covered ears. Sky subdued but growing in heat-strength
after a long bad dark blizzard-scarred winter. Pastel shadings of cloud fur the
aerial view. Fingers grow slightly numb and moan of cold recording overwork.
Harsh discordant windswept gullcries. Sand progressively less dark backing away
from urgent insistent water and all the way back into Rogers Park infinity.
You can
almost hear tattered intermittent acoustic-strummed lovesongs round a beach
bonfire borne on the historic wind, young laughter, passed hand-to-mouth
winejugs and joints, melting stickjammed marshmallows, writihing furtive
lovemaking just out of emberglow-illuminated crowd
kiss-and-tell view, barking dogs, youthful heat and quiet lifeburn fury,
legends of nothing but dark-obscured summer fun, drunken freezecry
skinnydipping, horseplay, sandkicks, firepokes, feverstorms of urgent
Midwestern passion, firefly-eyes glinting reflecting it all and nothing,
sandswarms, brainstorms, painstops.
Here comes the longed-for summer sing the romantic growing new-seasonal
undertones.
GIORDANO'S
Under-the-skin subliminal waspbuzz annoying moneymaker broadcasts from the
sports channel propaganda machine. Wallcover historical picture mosaic of
Chicago scenes and dreams and commercials. Preponderance of red-n-green,
could-be Italian flag colors, who knows. Bloodred glowing room-roof centerpiece
looking like something from a 1920s Expressionist flickershow dragged
style-screaming into the future and subjected to a lightsprayer technicolor
makeover. Sound collage: waitress questions, answers of the served,
end-of-night-thankfully vacuum, poor power-muted popcult music broadcast
through the uncaring no-prophet-just-profit-motive radio. Slowbump heatkiller
ceiling fans going in breezefeeler circles round nowhere. Beerglass sweatslicks
on the disappointed-it's-not-booze rednwhite checkered tablecloth. Buzz rising,
and when is ever-nearer placeclose? Leather booths, table centerpieces cutlery
monuments to food consumption and American empty calorie consumerism, consumed
by consumerism, putting the con and presumption in consumption. Pizza and pasta
and transplanted Mediterranean culinary goodfood-Italian pride. Damn that
slamming Sam Adams and all that sobriety damage, this time of night kicks in
the dumbage, releases the thoughtboy from the sanecage to embrace and embark
upon a different stage of night-talking.
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