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