i know things about chicago

and it doesn't require an audience.  anymore than the things i now know about chicago require an audience.  i see a lot.  always have.  it's a runaway thing.  having my degraded vision restored by glasses makes it possible to study an entire nightworld which, for a decade plus, was receding into fog.  chicago is a marvelous vista in the dark, the vast accordioned silhouettes with their rave-pastel windows grown from obsidian coral, and the roustabout gloam below, with its shadow circuits...  i go chasing police torchlights and trolling nervous patrolmen, who can't seem to find the crime they're after.  returning i see:  swift as cliff swallows cruising cyclists stop and organize a threeway with a willing benchsitter, kneeling as i pass.  the giver presses his right hand on the kneeling recipiant's shoulder, signaling not to stop, as his riding partner traces the small of the giver's back from latissimus dorsi to heavy rhomboids.  the trio pick up the pace as i leave them in dark tangles of overlaid park bench slats & inky whispering eruptions of brush, and i think of the thin young thing who preceded the threesome-- sauntering with the lip of his pants tugged beneath his iliac crest, signifying with his eyes and sniffing loud.  men like them number in the unknowns, as infinite as the number of nights that have incubated in this centre of teeming industriousness and accomplishment, as up against itself as it is against the elements

i can't say i know these people or know anything about them:  but i know me, so i can extrapolate the endless varieties of explanations, and i know need like few may imagine.  it's decent material.  the stuff from which life is built, though it's rarely said as plainly and openly as these minor demonstrations.  chicago never sleeps, like some aquatic mammal alternating autonomic activities between lobes of the brain; forever in motion, negotiating currents and avoiding obstacles, as some fathomless aspect of itself dreams deeply of kindnesses alien to light and the smoke-reddened eyes of john and karen q. public

on the other side of the smudged chalkmark of the horizon, in ontario, there is fire.  i do not know it, but the fog that has seeped between my eyes and the dim beach is thick with toxins.  the air has taken on a pervasive flavor of dried, salted meat.  a trio of friends-- two dykes and a skinny male  --caper in the tide, and i balance my ass on the steel cable guidewire in the center of the pier, sketchbook angled on my knee toward the floodlights.  felt-tip nib dancing in imitation of life.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will have a cough, and a persistent flavor in my mouth, and my chest will feel heavy.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will worry about the way the particulate count has shifted the refractory index of light toward the red, and how the vacant beaches echo high desert.  (yesterday) the next day i will wear a mask, and curse myself for heeding the call to adventure, and the seven-to-eight cigarette hangover coating my lungs; and the-today-after [earlier than now] i will contemplate the couples swimming, heedless of the white and khaki film of ash scumming the tide.  i will not speak to these daytimers, maskless, dapping their cans of coca-cola together, who cannot see the flaccid, eyeless, carrion-white bass with the hole torn in its back, lolling against the rocks.  death does not require an audience.  merely opportunity.  it will occur to me that these maskeless daytimers should be warned, but-- surely they were.  i know things about chicago.  and so must they