gave me things I could not use. Then. Now. Rain night bursting upon and into -- I shine up-down into Lake Michigan like the glow from the lights of the Loop. Walks. Deaths. Births. Streets. Things I could not give back -- or use. Gave me loneliness. Feelings I could not put into words into people. Blank monkeys of the hierarchy! More deaths! Stupidity and death turning them on, timing them to the beat of my droopy heart, to my Middle Passage blues to my self-corroding hate -- In my release, I come to become neon iron eyes stainless lungs blood zinc-gripped steel I come up abstract -- not able to take their bricks. Their tar. Their flesh. Their plastic. I ran -- stung. Loop fumes hung in my smoky lungs. Duped, left with ideas I could not break or form, I crawled through the game. Illusion illusion and you would swear before screaming -- these choked voices in me screaming. Screaming with crawling thing in the blood, screaming the huge immune loneliness. One becomes immune to the bricks to the feelings. One becomes death. One becomes each one and every person I become. And I could not -- I could not -- I could not whistle and walk in storms along Lake Michigan's shore. Concrete walks. Concrete deaths. I could not -- I could not swallow the lake. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...VICTORY BELLS by GRACE HAZARD CONKLING A TERRIBLE INFANT by FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON AT THE CANNON'S MOUTH by HERMAN MELVILLE SONNET UPON HISTORIE OF GEORGE CASTRIOT, ALIAS SCANDERBERG by EDMUND SPENSER |