Remember who you are.
Remember where you came from.
Remember what you’ve done.
Drawing breathes and stitching yarns
And have only but begun.

You are Chicago royalty.
You were born from black and blue.
You’ve got Maxwell’s equations,
Maier’s eye and Leaf’s Coney Island hue
and you owe no one explanations.

Know what you want from life.
Know that you can take it all in stride,
Know that you have Sandburg’s shoulders
Rising like a skyline, dividing like river
and winding like the city.

I sing a song of my self
and it is the dirge of my people.
One life’s mistake
fixed with a searing snip
and the smell of well-handled steak.
End of the line.

Buck stops here, Bucko!
I won’t be making all of my father’s mistakes -
just most of them.
I won’t die loveless
but I will die alone.
A ghost,
a memory,
a story,
an impression.

Oh, I will leave an impression.
Prep your RVs and tin foil satellite dishes!
Conspire in tattered lawn chairs
and anticipate my arrival.
For I am the meteor’s crater.
I will be a Roswell rumor
and a desert song,
told in the dunes of Barstow,
unchecked by the checkpoints
on roads traveled only by cargo -
human and otherwise.

Never go to Barstow.
It is filled with people like me.
A mecca for the dropouts
and the burnouts
and the sellouts
and the down-and-outs
lost in arroyos flooded
with unexpected doubts.

The pumps are as dead as the denizens -
the bleached bones of Morrison covers
and rusty rallies and journalist pilgrims,
gone gonzo on things worse than ether.
They are my people.

The people who sing the songs of themselves -
Sonnets of sadness,
long life lines
and tragic love lines,
Slanted rhymes and broken times.
The unkillable,
The unlovable,
The alone,
The free.

Remember caring?
When being human was in?
I miss the old days.

They bulldozed some dude’s
tent out of the public park
Not how public works

Day glow snow night sky
Blizzards blow over gas stacks
Second shift gets best slopes