Long Chicago Poems

Dad hit me only once, an upper cut to the solar plexus. It nearly lifted me off my feet. I was 17 then and already fairly tall, 6’1.” He was 48 and of medium height,...

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"Go on forth young graduates,

And show us who you are

You're now our future leaders

We know you will go far"

And so commencement ended

Pictures done and people changed

Now, off to private parties

All orderly pre-arranged

But four young girls...

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No, Freddie can’t say he mourned when his father died and his father’s third wife found Freddie's number and gave him a call to give him the news. His father had been responsible, worked hard,...

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I have travelled through the cluttered corridors of my tired mind countless times. 
I have reached deep into the dark abyss of my captive soul and in that profoundly disturbing darkness, I went searching to...

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A few years back,
in the prior millennium,
1993 to be more precise
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
born without a stage name
had his book entitled "The Evolving Self" published,
by which he meant The ReGeneratively Nutritious Flowing Self,
but he was probably shy...

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I met a proper woman in a proper pub on a Monday in Peoria. It was noon, time for lunch, and we were sitting stool to stool over very large burgers at a long mahogany...

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       Back Door Side Door Front Door : Which door might a Confucian take
 
..................for René ETIEMBLE (Jan. 26, 1909 – Jan. 7, 2002)*

In homage - dedicated to the...

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We have something in common, a fellow I talk to now and then. We’re about the same age and perhaps the only ones in the diner who think our past lives are interesting. So when...

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Tea in the afternoon with his wife of many years is usually peaceful, Hubert thinks before he makes his announcement. Then he says it. 

"I'm going upstairs," Hubert tells Ruth as he hoists himself out...

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Thirty years ago, long before ISIS started executing Kurds, Muslims and Christians, I hired a Pakistani Muslim as an art director in Chicago. I was an Irish Catholic editor putting out a small national magazine....

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_ a symphonic, folk rock, blues song
1.
I'm an old man looking
For the lost, best parts of me.
I'm an old man looking
For the lost, best parts of me.
I'm looking in the places
Where the people say love...

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I’m not saying my father hated the English, God forbid. If he were still alive, he’d hate to hear me say that. He’d correct me right away and say he didn’t hate the English. Truth...

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In 1962, I was a caseworker, not a social worker, in the Cabrini-Green Housing Project in Chicago. In that era, the difference between a caseworker and a social worker was simple. A social worker had...

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A Can Of Coffee
By Curtis Johnson

I do not remember telling him how his kindness to me made a major impression on my life, but I did share the same with his wife and daughter some...

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Someone please help me please call the doctor 911 it’s an emergency please
come save me
Because I'm going crazy a lot of people think I'm insane in the classroom
talking to myself as if someone is really...

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My father never talked much about religion but he went to Mass every Sunday, the 6:30 Mass where few people would be and he wouldn’t have to deal with friends and neighbors. His contribution envelope...

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As soon as I heard 
You were the First African American Male
To win the Pulitzer prize for Poetry
I wanted to run out and celebrate
I wanted to wake up Hughes and Dunbar
And Baraka and say we...

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Pittsburgh, hammertown, Chuck Knoll and his boys
established the best Superbowl Era dynasty
with the "Steel Curtain" defense and the "Blonde Bomber" Bradshaw,
a defense disciplined on shrapnel and elite ego,
"Mean Joe Greene" and Jack Lambert, a compulsive...

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   Who suggests a trip back...rides to this bit of nostalgia in the middle years of the Great Depression aboard a Chicago elevated train, "the El." We hurdle head-long above asphalt blanketed streets...

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In 1920, my father, 16, was a guest of the British government. He was a prisoner of their forces occupying Ireland at the time, a group called the Black and Tans.

One day he and seven...

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The radio plays their song
And two hearts beat as one
To the rhythm of a tune they call their own.
The gold and platinum vinyl spins
Creating the sound where love begins.
If only for the moment, they have...

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Pellucid pearls in northeastern North America since planetary birth
Comprise Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario dearth
Largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth 
Straddle Canadian–United States border tethering partial global girth
Constituting 21% of world's surface...

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When I was young, my father wrote poems, lovely poems, in Yiddish.
In one poem, he called me, his only son, his 'kadish'l, the one who would recite the Kaddish, the Prayer for the Deceased, for...

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                  Hillary Rodham Clinton, a trailblazer
            ...

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_____Daddy Saved These______

It has been many moons since my 
Father passed.
Then came that day, I unearthed 
these lovely treasures Daddy had 
saved.

My very first pair of knitted
pink and white booties.
Add a first pair of soft,white
high...

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