8 Tons

Nine facilities and more than forty
mattresses and beds and compressors
to our name because we are professional
bad asses walking the Chicago plain and
pained for words after talking up
and down elevators and disappearing
hospital staff and it feels like the end
titles to a movie shirts stuck to us
with salt and sweat and cigarette smoke.

Nodding to the breaks
and joints in the highway coming south
with whipped ash in our mouth in the cab
of our truck and the road here has been
harder than the ring of the company cell
dispatcher telling us to turn around for
a late added frame exchange twelve miles
out of the way and the road there will be
harder than the rays of the sun we saw rise
bricking off asphalt like the hot screws
on our sides where food should be.

My scars are itching from growing up
harder than a puppy in a refuse bin
gone so hungry the only way known
is the opportune binge and him?
His are from a few stints in the reserve
to get away from the city's inner drama and
support a baby mama's two kids and a cousin
with drug sunk eye lids, but I never
see him scratch at it, though I know
he keeps his keel even with
some kind of pill habit.

These days the afternoons feel like
some kind of wolf looking for a fox
in the high grass and finding only us
rabid rabbits swifting through Chicago underpasses
trying to make something green out of
diesel fuel, 16 thousand pounds, and a box of tools,
tucked shirts, leather belts, and a logo on lapels.
It made us feel like angels
making up for past distress and
advantageous ill gotten angles
delivering equipment to hospitals
was kinda like a god send
before we realized we running fool's errands.

Hand on the knob and turning the music up
so we can't feel our heads bang
up against the rut.
It never really was about eleven hour days
to get that time and a half pay and stay
on top of the cue and delivery windows
that made lunch fly by and time burn away,
or about being hard enough to take
the dog shit thrown our way.
All it is, mashing the horn at drivers
heading to homes on our road back north,
all it could be was the knowing
neither one of us should be there then
lighting up again to stay awake
taking the wrong exit.

He puts his elbow on the high sill,
our windows down and rubbing eyes
filling high with night air and
truck exhaust dead locked in rush hour
harder than 12 hour syrup caked
to plates of unfinished breakfast left
to take the el this morning, and speaks.
I just want to be successful.

Dogfight Bike

I can't range far from my aerodrome but,

the miles I can cover I do cover furiously.

Trundle climbs are graceful

as a man one hundred pounds overweight

mid-crosswalk in rush hour

at the turn of the light

who doesn't bother to look

because he knows most already are.

It's the power dives

that shine and I am

always too close for missiles

screaming Stuka-like between buses and

sedans with 30 millimeters ablaze and

exploding car horns in my wake.

A tanker flies by night and

the reflection of my fuselage on it is

what a dragonfly must feel

seeing itself rippling along the surface of a pond

and I would be remiss to let so large a target

go to waste.  Chase is given

in a running fight from light to light

down Penn avenue

before dawn rise and the tail gunner is good,

but I'm better;

the heat of exhaust is burning my nose

as her engines burn and break up and she's 

forced down

at the gas station around the corner

in mushrooming flames and smoke.

I am bringing my bird in

at my apartment door, making a note

to go back and raid what's left of the downed bogy

when I'm ready to pick up a bag or two of chips

this afternoon

aces higher than the sun
shining clear on my aviators.

Smoker 14

There was this idea
that maybe if I switched
to something harder on the tongue
and took smaller breaths
I could quit you.

Here we are.
Elbows dry and
lips wet.

Bed

If the choice is between
the jersey spread or
the nylon comforter
stuffed with things not feathery,
but still able to prick skin
in fits of tumble care sleep seeking or
nothing at all,
it doesn't worry me too much,
this pursuit of dreaming.
However the options all pale
to irrelevance
when twenty minutes in and
finally warm enough
to stop fidgeting
I realize my teddy bear
is still at my desk
catching up on some late night reading
yet again.
I thought we'd been over this already.

Blessing Their Boats

Leaning against a wall
of poured cement
despite the twenty five cent pieces
of faded spit stains and
gum like Beechwood bark
stretching left and right like
big cat skins,
the buses come regularly and,
between cussing phone calls and
pacing gentleman in
patch appliquéd jackets and blues,
more infrequent.
Behind mirrored aviators
staring down the barrel
of the high walled speedway
reserved for the P2 and Three, Flyers, and
the heard of 67s
running nose to tail downtown and
every point west in between,
the scale of clouds,
climbing choral and tight and
deep enough to lose in the expanse
of sunlight's streaking
spun streamer density,
is shaking knees and the knocking
is disbelief against the walls of chest
before the curling wave tops and
sound like thirteen hundred horns
raised beyond earshot,
I turn away for my small door and
smaller room with teeth held tight
as the pane of glass
holding back the crush in those spidering popping seconds
before the mouth of asphalt and tunnels
dilating like eyes in the heads
of a nursery.
A blessing
on their souls,
but I am not ready today.