Chicago, where the rails become streets,
where the wind winds around corners to double tier trains that rain down with thunder below
cloudbursts of snow and slow traffic

Chicago, where cars and trucks stop at lights on the bridges, resting wheels on wet tarmac and men pass by wearing cagoules and flat caps: bohemian grandparents on northern fronts.

Chicago, where every building is a flat iron or a pencil windowed and widowed of safety net architecture,I look up from the window and flutter as she does, the suicide shipwreck standing atop a roof looking up and falling down, into river and rail track wakes.


If the dial-up allows it and this note finds its way through the orchestra, let me tell you this:

*You look lovely in your flower tattooed white dress.
I shall write about  you until you read about yourself and smile, the rest has
been thrown into the wind and has come to settle in the tidal flow, sit tight and see where it goes.

Filaments fixed on your eyes all night
and the possibility of a chance, of an opportunity,
that I’ll be able to talk to you,
because the club lights are blue
stretched like animal hide across your own hide:
complexion clear cheeks still rouged
though tidal club glow is still blue.

It’s pathetic, worse than any diabetic
with their HumaPen Memoir insulin
length of pen, recording the time
and date
and precise amount of pain
they inject from the last 16 doses.

My pen is my keyboard and records
miserable times
and forgotten dates in cafes
and precise amounts of pain,
though this diabetic is a pathetic poet
and he knows it.

Melodies
on this air we breathe

Rest easy on strings
Ready to break

Enough space to see
In and out

Let us recline and sing low, slow
As a spout, to the sea,
'A word, away,
A long way from home
Let us not forget
Where we called 'home''

Before we leave here
Let us name this song

'Our own'

Hesitation enveloped me in bubble wrap,
My every word was watched in case it led to a trap.
You were in a cell I couldn't and still can't understand,
I reached for you but I was bitten
by two midnight hounds by your sides.
My faith you earned and so it was given,
from golden memories over time.
How I longed to storm the barricades,
and surface you up to the world of air.
Hammer in hand, break you out of reverie your frozen cave,
That embitters your veins and hardens you like sandstone not to care.
Will you forever stay a Princess locked in your own palace?
Letting armies of thorns cascade from pillar to post,
and draw blood from with that defensive line of malice.
I know you as more than this, than a wisp, than this ghost.
Meant to leave more on this canvas than a hand print my dear.
A full scale portrait is more suited,
But you've become what you once so venomously despised and held in fear ,
Any whisper of a conscience muted.
"Do  you love me?", you whisper,
And I - most certainly do,
But the more you demand it of me
The more it becomes less true.
So take away your armour and lay it for aside for me.
So I know behind it all you are alive and I was right to believe.