Best Urbanautumn Poems
On high-back benches
weary shoppers clutch their parcels
and slump.
Wrapped in a yellow green haze
Van Buren station sleeps
beneath Chicago's vibrant streets.
Outside, on wood-plank platform
we drink-in the coffee warmth
of October's fleeting sun.
"South Chicago, 23rd, 47th, 53rd, 57th"
Like some unraveling mass of I-beam steel
the tracks begin to rumble and shake.
The slant nosed Metra comes and goes.
Across the tracks in autumn plume
Grant Park displays her rows of golden elms.
A nor’ east wind dances bow upon bow,
with a gentle sway that shears away
a sifting rain of harvest leaves.
"Park Forest South, 23rd, 47th, 53rd, 57th"
On the slant nosed Metra
I hurry home.
I remember a place
with a heart concrete
that lived and breathed the night.
It was a place that glowed
pulsed in time with the pounding of the night's workmen,
stewed in the warm, wet flood of autumn streetlight
walks past stoops that lined the blackened stretch of tar
sneakers and scarves so cool
that they melted and smoked at the touch
And from your window,
you could see it all;
you could see the birds and the beetles
contented in their coats of cold,
And you could see me stop
every evening at the foot of your door
and tip my hat to the wind
that blew like lips to horn.
Your window was a gateway
to a place too good to live,
too good to believe in,
too good to taste and smell and touch
when the sun was up and shining,
for everything that happened
happened at night,
when the pipes lit up and the children's shoe-soles
sounded loud and echoed proud through the alleyways,
and the TV sets ceased their roaring
for a moment long enough to keep the hopscotchers on their canvas-clad toes,
and the radio merely tickled the air
with notes of a blue
deeper and truer than the vastest, most empty starless sky...
And spilled on the sidewalk-chalked walls of brick and young love
was a moon,
a moon whose dusty, yellow glow
was all that we thrived in
all that we loved and hated and wished and kissed in,
all that we sang and shouted and drank and pissed in,
and all of us missed it
when the hours on the clocks of dark dried up,
leaving us with little more than empty gazes,
empty bottles and empty beds,
empty arms and empty heads,
promises broken,
desires unfulfilled,
but with sweetest day dreams
of the night to come.