Best Poems About / On CHICAGO
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181.
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(Poem) (Chicago) (The Were-Age)
'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can't go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death's monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of flesh
Covering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes
Bill Knott
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Read more: history poems, future poems, death poems, light poems, wind poems, dark poems, poem poems, son poems, war poems, dog poems, dream poems
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182.
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Picnic Boat
Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
in curves are loops of light from prow and stern
to the tall smokestacks.
Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a
hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses
playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.
Carl Sandburg
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Read more: running poems, home poems, song poems, red poems, dark poems, night poems, light poems, cat poems
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183.
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Youth
Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.
He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.
James Arlington Wright
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184.
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On The Early English Poem The Ruin
Mile-wide ruin of a city,
ruin of a town,
told tales fragmented,
your lost poet foiled,
his ruined poem
once whole on vellum, torn,
blackened to earth,
shrunk into microfilm.
Bath was the city
that bred bright balladry,
a rumoured recital,
rare fresh-inked flower.
Rime in the mortar,
rime on the broken tiles,
gold on flashing water,
fragment of a world.
Fires, excavations,
puzzle your pathway,
for history existed
even in history.
Poet whose part is past,
wide-eyed wanderer,
ply us with phrases,
your damaged verses
ancient slabs
over springs still known to us,
piped streams
running with language.
Rime on the broken tiles,
lines on the damaged page.
Flare, crumple, char.
Vain, vanish with the Weirds.
2009 [recorded at Chicago Calling Festival 2011]
Sally Evans
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