I USED TO LOVE THE CITY

I used to love the city…

maybe because we both hummed
with kinetic vitality, youth/madness
twenty-four hour nonstop mania

An incessant surge of faces,
a blizzard of life simultaneously
blinding and buffeting, avalanches of noise
pulverizing the streets spread out
like entrails, leading everywhere
and nowhere in particular, yet they’d
take you there anyway through asphalt
curtains of hip-hop, reggae,
muscle coiling metal, ending where
Johnny Walker Red blues fizzes from
south side clubs and melds with
prickly country licks that don’t end
till the sun rises as hazily as a
homeless druggie’s cataract eyes

Sunrises erupting from the belly of
Lake Michigan, reflected in the glass
of the skyscrapers that sprout like
concrete weeds across the manipulated prairie
where the Midwest pioneer spirit
sweats and freezes in its perennial fatwa
against nature, giving no ground, grinding with
a force beyond its own power

Now I avoid the city…

with an older man’s defensive cynicism.
Where I once heard a jambalaya of music
turbocharging the heartland, I now hear
the riffs and rants of the inner city
buckling the listener with obscenity-fueled                                                                  
doggerel that attacks like terrorists,
corrupts like acid, degrades like gang rape

To cruise the streets now is to feel
as vulnerable as exposed organs, to lock
on the eyes of a populace that devours
its young for a divine high, vacant faces
barricaded in classrooms, while outside
the doors, sirens announce more blood
flowing through the sewers

My city is like a spoiled cake
hidden by a sweet florid frosting
and those City Hall bakers tell you
to hold your nose and take a slice, swallow
hard and ignore the indigestion

I observe from the safety of the borderlands
a city awash in the contradiction of growing
emptier as it grows fuller. Sometimes I think
I can still hear the chatter of traffic juking
like a pinball around its towering totems;
sometimes I hear voices in the farm fields
luring me away from the concrete dominions
of my youth, to a place where
the little voices are still cherished

THE TWIN DESTROYERS

Evil arrived sheathed in a metallic skin,
a winged hypodermic needle
injecting terror and death
into the American psyche.

The twin towers pointed skyward,
a monument to free minds
and unfettered intellect,
where dreams and reality meld and mutate.

Mohammed’s tribes sprang from their caves
like rabid bats, fueled by random emotions,
blinded by a thousand years of darkness,
 hating what they do not understand.

Where the Towers challenged the heavens,
the tribes wallowed in the muck of superstition,
force their only path,
myths their only blessed verities.

Evil hates the achievers,
for the world of evil is constructed
on pain and suffering,
where mindless sacrifice is the highest value.

The best defense is to keep erecting these towers
to heights these tribes cannot scale,
and let the tortured alloys of our hearts
provide the impenetrable materials.

What intellect builds,
tribalism seeks to demolish,
so be wary of the twin destroyers of humanity:

Faith and force

MISSHAPEN IDENTITY


Someone else is living my life…

someone taller, leaner, someone
who is dating angelic film actresses
that hang on his piston-like arms.
He’s living in my houses, too,
in South Beach and Malibu,
and throwing celebrity-laden parties
till the sun gropes its way overhead,
which is when he drives off in
my silver Mercedes SL500
to linger over a lazy breakfast
before jetting off to Cannes
to soak up the sun like a
sleek salamander asleep on the beach.

Which gives rise to the question:
Whose life am I living?