Corner coffee shop.
The world shoulders by.
The challenges of the day are on their minds.
Collectively, they struggle.
All are trying to find a place in this world.

Some seem consumed with God.
Others do not.
It is hard to tell the difference.
And that’s fine for these people by the lake.
Collectively, they struggle.
All are trying to find a place in this world.

When keeping Chicago,
You’re forced out of a comfort zone.
People, places and things; all new.
They are a lesson to be learned.
Collectively, they struggle.
All are trying to find a place in this world.

you are the reason I'm okay with
this god forsaken state.
if I left, I would leave you behind.
I cursed this town before your name was a part of my world.
you make it okay to stay.
you are my Chicago.
some love the skyscrapers
and the sunsets on the beach
or the streets that curve and illuminate the whole town.
that is their chicago.
but you are mine.
your eyes and smile are the skyscrapers in my heart
and your laugh is engulfing
like the lake.
you'll be my Chicago--
the one I will be homesick for because when I think of home,
I think of you.

Green envy flame, Titania reigns
Sweat/glisten, some men can't listen
Make up less face, love me the same way
Hard to leave this place
But new beginnings written
All over my eager face.

Extension of yourself,
My spirit--soul reaching, like inked limbs
Of tomorrow, crescent moon
Consumed in the artistry of every moment
Like my picture 142 times
Gotta wear overalls, crop top
Reach for the back audience members

Everyone is losing a nickel and dime
All the time.

Padding and sheets on the floor
"Talk about bohemian dream livin"
I jest in my nest of what has been
My nurture, vulnerability, intimacy.

We all comment and slosh
Our glasses embedded with whiskey
"Its so embedded"
Long Eyelashes said, as muscles and new dreams
Look sweeter, but lets kiss on Friday night
As I fly away from the ultimate Bohemian
Who told me in my cocoon:
"You talk too much."

Why do men say such things?
Is it that hard to listen?
To fill others with sincerity, joy
I don't know.

That extension of love
My mind wheeling around
Geography, topography, calculous
But in essences of green, red, purple
My keypad does not allow
Quick, swift fingers to say to past violence
"Wish you well."

Remember how I use to send you poems of the day?
Me neither.
But I can, through that lie to myself
Outline what I thought we were
Like an ink gun exploding
Just GO, girl

Because my wishing, my kissing
I flutter like a sea of dragons
For those who join the ride,
Next to me.

The Windy City.
Sometimes I worry heavily
About popularity.
But I took my time walking the city street
Tonight.
I stopped in front of the grave site
Where freedom was won for us
Through ****** wounds and all the tunes
Of men who fought so valiantly
To just tell women: "You talk too much."
?????
????
??

Lets fight the good fight
Lets replace our swords with sharpness of wit
Lets put down our guns and aim generosity, instead
Lets let go of the mallet
The grenade
The pitchfork
The joust
Wouldn't you rather save, expel
Your energy for a peaceful humanity
Happiness rings at its doorbell.

Wedding veil, do we run out of things
To discuss?
Past the age of huge mistake, some say
Wait until you are at least 30
While the South croons and cranes
Patriarchy.

Who is to hammer down their gavel
Of how to map out your life
Who needs an exact map?
Lets sleep on the floor
Ink our bodies to look like paintings
Kiss lips of those we love
Trust that success, happiness
Peace--
Is no where to be found
In weaponry.

Inside, Your cancer's beating heart
My ******* shakes, dirt dust gone
I swipe the sand away. For every ounce of ****
Laughing out meaty red raw steaks and size zero thighs.

     - For everythingsobad. You rattle my dream box with your sweet blue face and your gauges for neither being an idiot or being human. Too cute of you booboo. Captivity claws at you, you big bafoon, intolerant, shuffling your predicates back and forth during your 12am nonsensical *******. So long as it doesn't interfere with your curfew.

Like soggy altered-state popcorn. Your butter catches more flies than knives, the inauthentic gestures spattering over the rhythms and rolls of your fingertips is torture to watch. Kitchen countertop influenza. A tired dictionary of sad words, poor misfortunes, tired eyelids, silty and sandy crusty inside corners of the eyes

                           .rearing privilege

countertop crawlers. inaudible coos used by muses who can't keep their musings from tangling the long distance dial tone soaring through the ears like an Italian operatic melodrama. A horse, three brides, and a funeral. One woman, a sick child, blindness, blinding caused by toxins of the body stuck inside your gelatinous fishlike eyelids. Where's there an eye bib and a lance when you need one? A nifty electric toothbrush shank with extra reach and plaque protection. You're the kitchen sink they threw in, a budget meeting with a data analysis staph infection. A government where nobody wins. All the kids grow up with thin skin and an aorta with no ventricles in it. It's like the cynical prison system that we had to survive in our 8th grade basement dungeon. Thundering, curmudgeons drugging sluggishly, **** teen thugs. Preteen pornstars sluicing cash through their meaty canals, ******* the ******* and ******* the back bare in a messy afternoon of **** *******. Crusty infectious rumors made worse by brothers and moms, eating handfuls of Norco just to keep the family strong.

I
Whispering winds whip the lake's eastern shore.
The towers above stand still,
gazing upon the infinite individuals below,
within the concrete maze; this city speaks to me.
It utters thousand of voices simultaneously.
Some unfamiliar to me,
all keep the labyrinth in mind.
Each voice different,
each voice similar in its journey
to conquer the labyrinth.
I too share the same goal,
but in the labyrinth, most don't know what I know.

II
The river twines around towers
creating the famous "loop."
The river's end irradiated for man,
until we flipped the flow in
labyrinth's past to avert windy shores.
The once river's end, now a beginning.

The labyrinth's bourgeois lie due north,
It's extravagance exemplified by magnificent miles
where whimsy wanderers flaunt status
and to the west and south,
an eternal siren's call resonates for all voices to listen;
urban decay haunts the once prosperous.

III
For only collectively can the labrinth be tamed
and imminent ends for those unworthy.
The lake, the river, its towers and people
shall never be neglected.
For only collectively can the labyrinth be tamed
and this labyrinth is all that I know;
this labyrinth is Chicago.

I am drunk on your breath, while a slave to your sighs.
I live in your heart and sleep in your mind.
Keep me in your eyes, and lend me your hands.
I want to live next to you wherever you choose to land.
There's a time when we thrived near the cockerell plain
In the strawberry fields where we danced and we played.
It's so unbelievably ****** to be three thousand miles away,
We haven't seen we for three years, but we work towards it every day.
Nothing ***** as much as being in the wrong state.
Being in the worst way, and living in the wrong place.

It's like a jungle sometimes
that's what The Grandmaster said
but learning about bodies being found in alleys over colors
that's maybe not what he saw in his head
the streets are cruel, but they teach you a lot
every day in my city it seems
someone's getting shot
More bullets pop every night
And more kids don't get to see the sunlight
to quote Run-Dmc whatever did happen to unity?
we lost the concept when getting money and turning up became the only objects
of our fascination and now our babies won't grow up to see outside the chainlink fence that symbolizes the divide between the hoods, north south west and east side we need to call a truce put all the beef aside and let's grow as a city it won't be easy at all
but I guarantee if we can do this it's together not apart from the homies is how we'll ball

I called to give you a rearrangement of irony and a bucket full of Jews, I tailor made a rebreather because the past connections were used . Indeed, just like a crossview that encouraged stars to collapse, then did a fix up for the X's and O's so every oxymoron followed with a laugh. A pail of shrubs, an ounce of yore, yesterday you were following your very own bated breath. Up until you challenged yourself to a duel, you didn't look so bad for a disastrous mess. Harms' Way could be the place in town where odds go to get even, or it could be the street where Blow-Pops aren't just made, but also handed out to toothless citizens. We the captured, please and thank you, sir and mam until our captors go, like if you imagine  The Godfather in The Graduate, describing how the Komodo dragon roasts. We haven't made it thru a single day since they've come in packs of seven, but today we'll have the chance to share some face time with the hours that we are being given.

Misty-eyed, mournful, and very sorry walked in separately from the yard. They drank cold-filtered PBR and joked about all the kids they may have fathered. Has it been four weeks or just four days, since the Ferguson, Missouri Captain resigned his post? I was always taught that for a captain to go out, he or she must go down with their boat.

In time where boredom lays around with dynamite by the loads, tomorrow remind me of the basorexia I've had since we met not long ago.

The terrifying teeth chatter into the crimson lips of a wound up smile, chattering along the very risen table top that draws all small toys to their finite dooms. While breaths sour hour upon hour, each idling ear suffocates the last gasping breaths of its epicurean syllabic tongue, drizzling down the stomach like melt water from a cubic glacier in an ornamental silver tub, and sternly quibbles the stem-like dactyls drawing rose champagne into a fissure of the brain's tumescent humming.

Each finger tips' nail rouge and red, each dry crevice sewn into the knuckles, and a leaflet on sadism near the scratchy illegible lines whittled on the topside of the wrists and the slalom runs of the ankle. The ankle sinister. The ghost-like hallow sockets of where eyes could have once be seen. Plaster and albicant-like dying death white skins forbade from the Flushing streets where the jazz dance once began. And with each nellypotted hop, three useless nuisances could not carry the bridle towards each nearly favorite sound that curiosity enslaved man to lean towards.

The women weirded out by corners, plastic-wrapped furniture in outdoor corridors, where sinners veil their retreats into state run triage centers. Fake plastic countertops built from fake plastic trees. With an M14's muzzle stiffening and shuttering, she who vents off her cured romances will always find herself flaccid on rubber knees. The disease of the plea, is once more an affectation of not falling for royalty but instead the royal we. There is this weapon of fraud that perplexes geneticists, that enslaves heterosexuals, where albeit nor the time or place, she venerates the libations that her mind creates, she lubricates her cells, dressing, her skin ripening, heaven trickling across her humble nape, where gentleness is only a fool's disease and need.

She. We. Heathens of eternity bowing our breaths in grand hyperbole see. I see she, and she sees me.