Thunder Soot

The city sweats and moans against my window, smirks with bloody lips down on my roof a big inside joke. 

The throb of my life is a bubble in its knotted stomach frothing up through the throat near a liquor store, eternal train hiss.

The howling alleys are always wet on the inside painting children's coughs with grease, chemical merciless mystery one esophagus to another.

The trees are cornered in their own silence and hang about in a crypt of old echoes, misplaced codas waiting for some song to change its chords.

The stars shut their eyes as the crotch of downtown fucks blush into the sky, neon tongues glazing pale into every womb.

Thoughts grow shiny scales in the dark drool of gutters and stretch wide baleful mouths, fumes of the city lung.

They're all searching upwards snaking round spears of rain in angry chess, the gypsy lake-forest pinning them back down check by check to scent a brick bouquet of black iron stems.

The uniform does not fit, smells of soot and sick lightning, it's the kind of cohesion that eats through veins pressed against a burning grid, a breast of nails, a cage from which no angels escape, Chicago.