By Katie L. Austin
1. Clark and Lake
Rising up on scaffolding of aging wooden stilts,
You loom over the blustering bustle of The Loop
Like a vast conduit of plank and steel
Pumping the platelet-trains full of atom-people through the city’s clogged system Blue Line, Green Line,
Brown Line, Pink Line,
Orange Line,
Purple Line Express,
Your rickety pulse pulls the train cars back to the city’s heart From far-flung ethnic neighborhoods
Where the smells of pierogies and bratwurst stamp out urban stench And the tightness of your operations
Overtly force the rubbing of elbows between
Cocky men in three-piece Armani suits
Fresh out of the Stock Exchange on LaSalle,
Club-footed pigeons with suspiciously missing toes,
Beggars who slink from car to car and force interaction when there’s no escape, And the unsavory-neighborhood queens
Belching angry slang and gossip into Sprint walkie-talkie phones
And polluting ears with both halves of a conversation
That no one wants to hear.
2. Riding the 36
The toxic churnings of an addled mind
Leach into your circuit boards,
Setting every synapse alight with hurried sparks and pops of protest,
Every nerve ending twisting like your lips set in a screwed sneer
As the liquid fury shorts out the vestiges of logic,
And in an instant, my drowsy, belching bus ride from
The fragrant Broadway mix of pho and garbage
To the grime-caked brownstones of the Ethiopian neighborhood
Is grasped in your loud grip
And carelessly shaken like a fragile Christmas present
Without regard
Until the relative quiet shatters like the box’s crystal contents.
And so it goes every day, riding the 36
Uptown to Boystown, you bellow,
Ranting about the government,
The Jews,
The Illuminati,
You paranoid fucking lunatic.
This city is thoroughly scrubbing off my enamel of empathy
And leaving dry-socket deposits of acrimony and misanthropy
One insufferable ride at a time.