HILLMANN360@AOL.COM

City, this City

1
Kids runn’n around it’s streets, hearing fairytales of fisticuffs
these streets of gun-blast siren lullabies
this
this street fight city Chicago

it speaks to um

through um

2
Fish like to float, belly up, mouth opening and closing rhythmically down this green water river, under the up-down bridges. They don’t know of the others, the one’s out as far west as this city will stretch, those ones never float, the only rhythm is the cadence of their boiling splashes, they are fat and two feet long, men must stand at the high bank and shoot them with arrows.

3
On the near south side, before 95th along the expressway, under the bridges, deep in-between the rusted and bent beams that rest on the concrete abutments, there are piles of pigeon shit.

Mountains deep in the caves,

They smell of death and are slowly being blown away by gusts from Semis. The pigeons there spook easy and in the cool of night, they shake constantly. Their babies sit in the midst of these mountains and play, cry for food and are sometimes… left.

4
Prize fighters this city, they get smoked by off duty cops while stealing mustang convertible, cause they don’t know no better.

Garbage scattered in the streets.

They wear tats like armor, scars on the brow and the scalp from bottles, there’s nothing the ring can do to them they haven’t already felt. They are street pugs, bound forever to be the badest kid on the block, they are lonesome always and at night, dizzy, they walk the halls mumbling eye’s closed, shadowboxing.

 

5
Rabid cats
long legged black
stalking men
under L stop
Clark street
pimped cracked
sharp teeth laughing

6
Parking lot pop trunks
bring aluminum twang
bat thuds on flat scull leaks
polished deep brown skin… looked like jam
I saw him there
waiting for the straps

floating in it

I saw him

7
The old man and his pit bull walk these streets at sunset. It’s all there is to do now, since the burn summer day. Now heavy air smog sunset, his brim hat hangs, long pants, long sleeve button-down shirt, shoes brown leather polish.
Ghosts survive come to walk with him as the light slips, the children say they cut his tongue out so he couldn’t snitch… the dog ate the bodies… paid for the Cadillac.

I saw him once, years later, stepping out of the Green mill, his old haunt

8
Silly girls haunt old grimy bearded poets
in rented house legend of the youth there, near Belmont and Clark
their eye’s lie and his too
the old women stare
offended by this underground cave
of the innocence
the women on his walls his testament to a passion
they stand next to his others artists, derelicts, musicians, poets, his daughter.

 

9
Song-writes haunt this city
with grass hopper legs
slick hair and black suits
They play piano and love the women of this city
and when they sing
underground mic scenes go silent

a girl along the wall weeps
and the rest wonder

how he got there

10
C.P.D. this city
they’re thick powder blue
they hurry to fuck hookers in make shift brothel busts
before the chief gets there

They hold meetings in rail yard lots
on their way to get inmates stitched up at 4am

They shoot mace at violent bums for fun
they try to do good when there isn’t any good left
when stab victims bludgeoned women as they bleed out cause she dropped the knife

They are the ever-present eyes of this city

they hate these streets

they see clear

11
DTC boys ain’t scared of guns
when Spanish Cobras come shoot’n they chase them
un-armed
through carnivals
past Clark street
into drug store, back room
where they stomp them, to death
take the gun home… laughing

a ten year old following them the whole way

12
Billy boys can’t take it
naw but this city
makes um

blood flow streets
lump throat head throbs when it comes

It won’t happen again tear drops
make legends

this one way street

13
Nights were 4 took 12
Bridgeport boys
not like night when project kid
peddled through and they
smashed him with a brick
naw
It started when fist hit Franky made his knees jump
head hit the street
and ended with the blonde kid
eye’s rolling body shake

scared
all 12 of um scared
the night
four kids said ‘no more’

14
Big brother stood, hands raised legs stiff as waves rocked him back and forth on the pavement, the left hook knocked teeth down his throat and made the piss burst in his jeans. Like the time they hit me in the street, 3am with the wood steel barricade three times… back of the head.
The rest held me. But it dried by morning, so did the blood in that freezing city cell, shirtless, solitary.

 

15
Subterraneans
Bitch behind the bar
scammed me out of fifteen,
fuck it, why not
Maybe not a bitch
just strung out on broke down dreams,
another Wicker Park 20 something
thin on hope, fat on image and drink… too much

Sweet probably smiling at the regulars, goes to church every Easter with her Grandma
Christmas eve too, has a cat named Sammy… a long hair
never scared of it, even though it scratches her sometimes,
ain’t that how they are, like cats.

16
The trainer here wears a leg brace
he carries a bullet from a robbery
in his spine… seventeen years

Sometimes, before fights, he pulls his pant leg up… shows it to his fighters

17
Country girls come to this city to go mad
they fall in love with gay Africana’s
she waits for his release from the pen

she thinks the Vice Lords are Mexicans
they follow her home from the train
ask her to be their mother.

 

18
Old skinheads creep along Belmont Ave in all black
they bring us with them
if we aren’t too scared
to the blood there, dried 15 years before

the street thirsts for him
tired of the derelict diseased blood
that sustains it tonight

C.P.D. rolls by
one nods his head
then they’re gone

The kid can’t control himself
the Joker salivates from the incident
it’s all there, one night four thirty AM

19
White kids don’t play basketball in this city
they get crossed-over, even by the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans
the black kids dunk on them, until one day they don’t come back

the courts empty of them

Years later they see a 5'8" white kid from Indiana dunk on two blacks in the lane and wonder why… no one told him.

20
Project kids forget their names on these courts
forget the game
they dance and shout to the dhm...dhm....dhm
There they forget Paxon was white and Pippen was black

they just remember Jordan was the greatest

21
Bouncers in this city don’t give a fuck
they’re like gangs really
the bar their set
they’ll chase you
out the street
down the block
all of um, the bouncers, the bar backs,
the bartenders
when they catch you
they hold you down on a car hood
they drag a barricade from the construction site
down the street
the wood, the steel the bolts jingling
one of them holds it over their head behind you
and slams it down over and over
a woman screams
a cabby stops and yells out ‘you’re gonna kill him’
they don’t stop till the cops get there
or until you’re dead

“I am Billy the kid” he whispered