Midwinter night,
Clark & Halstead brushed with this week’s snow
grill lights blinking at the corner
                     decades ago
Smokestack poked above roofs & watertower
standing still above the blue
                  lamped boulevards,
sky blacker than th’east
  for all the steel smoke
                  settled in heaven from South.
Downtown—like Superman’s Gotham City
               battleshipped with Lights,
    towers winking under clouds,
       police cars blinking on Avenues,
                 space above city misted w/fine soot
cars crawling past redlites down Avenue,
                       exuding white wintersmoke—
Eat Eat said the sign, so I went in the Spanish Diner
The girl at the counter, whose yellow bouffant roots
         grew black over her pinch’d face,
         spooned her coffee with knuckles
                    puncture-marked,
whose midnight wrists had needle tracks,
               scars inside her arms:—
“Wanna go get a Hotel Room with me?”
                 The Heroin Whore
thirty years ago come haunting Chicago’s midnite streets,
me come here so late with my beard!