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Ian Beckett May 2015
Love not absence makes the heart grow fonder
Today we have no doubt that this distant closeness
Between a Southside girl and a Northside boy, though
Scattered by the winds in our banking crisis, that
Brought them closer, though far away showed
Us all that they were made for each other.

Love not distance in those three thousand miles
Brought us together in the city that never sleeps
You my Southside girl and I your Northside boy
Together our challenge is an opportunity for life
That shows nothing will ever do us any harm
And that we were made for each other.

Love not closeness won my candlelight bid
For your hand in marriage today as our hearts
Were the willing victims of bold Cupid’s arrows
So I am proud to say we stand as one, proclaiming
What our families and friends already know that
You were made for me and I was made for you.
Muyi Mar 2017
For give me mothers if I take another son away
The ***** shouldn't a tested if my ****** wouldn't spray the K
2 the face
2 the point
Hollows in yo temple *****
Leave 2 dents in yo face like some dimples *****
+
Ugh
+
The devil told me that I'm coldblooded
Semi stoic look on my face n these hoes love it
Ain't got it on me when they shoot imma road run it
Never put trust n no ***** cuz these hoes covet
+
Ugh
+
Im like the black mclovin
Wit a wrap sheet 4 days
Tell yo mans cuz he shovin
N if low keep pushing imma have 2 start bussin
'Nother dumb ***** dead in the streets over nothing
Agh
+
My mama say that idk about the struggle but she don't know half if the **** a ***** toggle wit
+
She only know about a 5th of the **** I did
+
N if she knew me she would call me the apocalypse
+
Cuz I done did mo dirt then a Lil bit
+
N if this rapping don't crack imma cop a brick
+
These ****** say they were its at but the fulla ****
+
Cuz we the only mfs really taking risk
+
When I was 17 I ****** a ***** n she was 30
+
They call it statutory **** but I was hella flirty
+
I know some ****** out south that'll do u *****
+
Razor blade 2 yo face like that ***** birdie
+
Ugh
+
I gotcho sis on my lap
N yo fix in a sack
Text books on my back
Imma lowlife pirate I ain't even gotta act
N my ****** on attack
Lowlife just relax
Ugh
1+2

N I mean that ****
I was blind 2 it all now I c that ****
Imma show u mufuckaz that u can get rich
If yo friends turn 2 opps n yo main chick flip
Ugh
+
I think Im in love wit this girl I just  met really outta nowhere  but Im crazy so idk. I want her so ****** bad but I gotta wait. .....
Teresa Magaña Mar 2012
Winter dies
Spring comes alive
There is no Autumn in Chicago
And Spring leaves as quickly as it arrives
Jolting us to what is always an uncertain Summer
That’s my city
Just like my heart
My love life
Chicago
I don’t have one without the other
Mashed up together
Yet separated
Segregated
Deep Love on the Northside
Lover on the Southside
Sidekick on the Westside
And when it’s all too much to handle
The East is my escape
Sitting on the rocks letting my legs dangle and toes dip in the icy cold greenish lake
I feel comfort in it
Immense and wide spread, like me sometimes
Clear but *****
Supposedly the cleanest water you can drink
After the city purifies it of course
Just like me, just like mine
My vessel pours clear and *****
But the city purifies me through cleansing nights
Through raised glasses of wine and music that harmonizes my heart
Kisses that clean and absorb
Tongue that licks off the saltiness I’ve accumulated
A thin layer
Its washed off and cleared from one moment to the next
Like the city skyline
And I’m ready for a new day
A new love
Or lover
I reincarnate in the Spring from what seems a slow death but was only a tormenting hibernation
Led into another uncertain Summer
Returning with scorching tenderness through cool breezes and radiating heart
Radiating sun
That’s how it feels in Chicago
That’s my City
Just like my Heart
I don’t have one without the other
Very inspired by my city today. =)
Ryn Feb 2017
“I won't drink the tap water, its poison here”
and when she declared that,
I couldn't decipher if she meant here
as in Northside, or here as in America.

We ate sushi at 2am in the city
I was trying not to show my drunkenness
but I was stumbling into an accent
my grandparents carried with them

tucked in the backs of their mouths,
now peering out of mine.
testing the hydrogen
in the beer
in the back of my throat.

I need sleep,
I'm hungover
This poem can wait.

My mind seems to move itself,
spinning somewhat
while I remain stationed
to soft and tattered cushions

At times, not sure who's moving
Mind or body
like parking next to someone
who's leaving the lot

for a moment
you're caught in the standstill
Where nothing really stands,
Still.

I need sleep
My head feels fuzzy
This poems not great.

Its much later now,
the world seems
more capacious somehow
When my eyes are fully open.

The last of my confounding
half light musings
dissipate like tendrils,
mist in the rising sun  

and I, I am left behind
in the residue,
The hardened truth
that cannot move.

“This water is poison”
Her words echo through my day
and I wonder if this poison
will ever evaporate from our veins.

C.e.M. 12.15.2016
first draft
Doug Potter Sep 2016
We  do not have to know the man who  walks
three hours northside to southside  of town
past green bluegrass lawns, over white
picket fences, around chains of
snapping curs and through
vegetable patches to his
home willed him by
his dead mama;

knowing him is not necessary,
helping him is our responsibility.
About a local man I have know most of my life.
Sherry , amber shoulder length locks of hair
Passing ****** on the rail line
Beside abandoned tracks north of Ola
Sharing youth with bamboo pipes
Period hovels belonging to 'the State' collect
until a sleepy town is manifest before red
eyes , against laughter and regret tinged
with melancholia , ten seconds of concern
entangled with indifference
The crunch of gravel beneath our feet
Winter breath , *** hole lakes , dying streets
Beautiful , personal , discreet sundowns smattered with drug induced catatonia , 'Walnut guardians' and cherry trees*...
Copyright January 16 , 2017 by Randolph L Wilson * All Rights Reserved
jettlotus Dec 2016
I hid behind long locks of dark hair back then.
And sang of places I would not visit for another three to five years.
Some places had real names but were fiction in my brain.
I gave myself an alias among others' real names.
Why was I so secretive?
"You are young," they'd tell me.
I didn't want to hear that.
The room was a relief from the Ohio cold in mid-January,
that was always when the air was the most brutal.
The community we built was short-lived but lovely
it was where I tucked myself away for the winter
before climbing out on my two hands
and not ever thinking to look back.
What does Canberra really need
A new northside hospital
Or a 30-000 seat in the ANU
A hospital will help a lot of people
Get better
I had celluitis on my leg
I am wearing a compression stocking for lymphedrmia
And I have a mental illness
I also have kayo
To watch sport at home
So I don’t really think we need a new stadium just upgrade Manuka oval
For AFL GIO stadium for rugby league and rugby union and soccer and improve mackellar park and hawker softball field
Make sure this hospital has a great psychiatric facility and a good service to help people with lymphedemia and celluitis and better hospital beds
Those beds were uncomfortable
Sit back and say do we need a new hospital or new 30-000 stadium in Canberra
night covers all;
as critters crawl crosstown
casting graffiti shadows over
walls and huddled mounds
of despair

I encountered one
wrong-turned
down a cul-de-sac
off northside

a weathered boot
caught my eye

I swerved and sweared
sparing bones
and medicaid

but for the moon
and rearview magic,
my conscience would've been stained
in homeless blood

~ P
Max Neumann Sep 16
He don’t know **** about having a crew backing him
Nothing about protection
About blood
The streets up north
The painters

Crazy-*** Louis
****** kid with a Muay Thai story
Blazed-out, cigarette-strewn room
Reeking, ready to throw down
Yeah, exactly

He don’t know **** about H-Town
Linden
OK, machetes, PBS
HCT, fingers and knives
Suicidals, street fights, the scene
Doors, rings, psychosis, brawls
Straightening things out

He don’t know **** about Dennis
Thrown into a group home at seven
Never cry
Or it’s lockdown
Permpool Northside money-printing nights
Flipping cash
Packs of smokes
Cartons, busted bodegas

He don’t know **** about Gino
Mom on ******, dead
Dad locked up, mind in orbit
Funeral, ****** crowd
Feelings buried under a hoodie
Chest out

He don’t know ****
Just a little
Only the tip
The iceberg’s carried by
The colossus

He don’t know ****
That’s his blessing
He Don't Know ****
Evan Stephens Feb 2021
Love, please tell me
where to cast my life -  

The ivoried downtown
and sleeted piers

of Washington,
where the Potomac

sleeps itself blue,
& the rows of museums

pull coffee teeth
in a closed afternoon?

Or the northside quay
& green garden walls

of Dublin, where I walked
in your hand, eyes to brim,

out to Phoenix Park
to search for the fallow deer,

but finding instead
only a debris of wind?

I'm owned by neither:
I wake each day

into a dead space
without color or shape,

only these memories -
do you remember

leaving yoga on
Connecticut Avenue,

the petrichor winding
out the night's full flower,

the nuzzling shine
of the walk?

I don't care
where it happens,

but that's what I want,
every day,

those steps home with you;
every ******* day.
Third Eye Candy Sep 2020
On the Northside of a very private Southside-
where a Midwestern Daguerreotype
of Some Kind

[ Eastbound ]

On Pure
West
Business.

Had mine eyes fallen
upon worlds
between
wheels.

Having learned much from toil-
and extravagant galas
my appetites subvert
the meringue
as an infinite feast
unfurls.

breaking bread in an alcove
of cinnamon stars
in a pitch black white
that goes with everything
you’ll never Know.

like a flawless gauze
wrapped around
an itch.

II

In the telling of Sunfish Fables
one must contort the bend
to render a skeleton key
to a locked Rune.
Ya gotta foil the fates fancy
with turbulent renditions
of inner hurricanes
that cast such spells
as to weather you.

even at the bottom
of the sea.

you gotta burn rocks with your teeth
because your tongue is busy .
sleep after death
because Now is too soon
to forget how to be
Alive.

And too brief to
believe
Until it's
True.
Range wars and water fights,
stories told and legends made up,

I am asking your attention, not per
mission, I am on my own, worth per
precept dispatched and reset per use

make the kind of man who believes
modern armies have one use, one alone.

War, for any reason, a warrior ethos,

X wars long form, whole whying wars,
with words working the balance co
gnostication wise knowing science all

that was Logos to Aristotle and Epimenides and Saul of Tarsus,

all wise citizen's when men's minds
and muscles and wills to resist insisted

come along or be ignorant of the worth
of war, come fight your own way out
from a cult that ate better men than

me-self and my weself, when I listened
while praying saying such ideas aloud,
as raised a momentary heart felt will

we may imagine thinking each word
as if it were formed from letters, many
as two letter words lie idle as pi to many

how
ever
here
we make some static and tip the balance
we ought to know what the prexy got
on his standandardard reason ings exam
srie, he passedemallfliyin ointment, hate

to say, but we just can't say, he's likely
was one of the top guys in military school, we can be sure he hates whom he believes are his enemies, including me and you, if you read this far and don't confess, holygnoshit they all cheated?
Life in the era of Ancestry.com

tipped toward hero story kings winning,

forethought, holiday season, annual
opportunity to make believe, next year,

look who had a baby, may be usual best,
look after children we sired, aware if it
does
happen, we both were savvy enough,
we agreed to share the care, and accept

true love feels good to make, and peace
is even better, good to make believe,
it can last, unless one of you breaks
pretend to be at peace, in mind,

and mend the gate to hell,
as we realized we are spirit creatures
already spent our last dime, caught this
old
cold
idea virus, think a tiny bit of it true
and it grows into a double minded you
one reader makes it work, sneeze it
one wonders if t'other what ifs

and most stories
capable of feeding a teller, needed

an ethos,
a bag of weights, agreed to locally

whose side was the wrong side,
in which war to get to where we were

when I woke up this morning, stretched

same yesterday lies, lie still today,

so today bets tomorrow's better,

calling all effectual fervent pray answers,
yeses pile to the ceiling, ah

you noticed, in the JWST sphere's edge,

I traveled 100 miles today in a car,
I could never repair, maybe a flat,
I once repaired a Triumph Spitfire,

with a butterknife, a VW carb float
and a Zippo lighter, on the northside

of Route 66, you honked and waved,
hippies were friendly, I was imagining

winding detcord around freeway bridges
before they got to Flagstaff and ruined
my own private four leaf freeway
exchange,
with no free way either way, a junction
in the middle of forest, Yavapai land,

Interstate 40, was approaching at speed,
speed of life then, speed of mind now,

fast as fine structural constants occur

constantly, infinite dirivitive knowledge,
constituting new knowing, new ways we

work while we agree we are two me and
thee whithersoever and whensoever we

cross purposes
in some classic gaseous spirit defined,

so fine, no finer, atoms, and then, we
boomers were born into evidence, we
learned central point gravity spinning,
and electromagneto coil winding,
in seventh grade science, needed
before we used power tools,

eighth grade, 13, hit, Donald Trump,
big kid bully rich boy, needs discipline,
so, when I was experiencing 1961, he

was experience the least possible link
me and him and that summer, except

For Mantle and Maris and ******
at the Drive In, double feature
Lemon and Remick, Days of Wine and
Roses, summer of bayou swimming,

chameleon seeing, and seen again later
such creatures live a sane and simple life.

Words as tools to think with, once,
then cast aside, to think with infinite
precision, not wrong, even a we bit once\

one drop om'gahdshesdonit, we bit


Muses entertainers users attend to
uses some fine ideas hate, in allergic

terms
sneezing, secret school records,
under secret power locked and keyed
all paper. All at once, nobody ever knows

manifest peaceability say to where Jesus is
peace be still,
stop and retake certain vows, try to remember
September Journey… once, on Earth, here, peace
se no se free from pressure all around centered

sense sapience from higher forms of well formed we,
we think and breathe, each day, time, per instance
now, we pray, truth be told,

and if its worth my time, redeemed per usual fees
puppy sneeze static, danger, will disease creep in fi

finest ratio of one to precisely this is not that, if we

thunk it… let it ride, I bet today becomes readily
available, easy read, cheap, free used spit images hit.

--- pro eh profess protest… promethean fame
Epimethean shame, we shouldalistened, we
refuse union containment, aweforms as us
awful old man gaseous weform reforms
jokes broke
whenkidpreachers told'em yokem
ropem ridem vaquero, kpow
Dunson land brand, on Jesus, this Christmas

witness an abortion survivors testimony,
unfortunately recorded when delivered
glossalia-wise lies lay lady lay. Big brass bed

I shined such a thing, I know what you mean,
they were noisydamnedsprings what you mean

mom and dad did that and did not know kids could
just up and grow old and good for nothing, fair trade

boomers alive today survived, by living
through everything that made Donald possible,
nothing makes believing him good is peaceable,
non sense thinking circa 1865, wonder ifery fiction

hmmm, shotgunweddins, in my times

as a witness, some times, I say I knew then
as a freeborn child to as far as I knew then
aiiiiiii zooms to infinity, if that's your per
spective, point, a star out in ever sense
freeborn grown men, in National debt.

My credit got me old, and this wise, no mas.

My legacy is my only actual effort at art,
for goodness sakes, aitia causal effectuality
I saw a fiddler fiddling child tunes, cartoon tunes
turkey in the straw or something, but he was not
a good fiddle player, he was missing something,

a muse used to amuse such as find me amusement,
no thinking needed, free standing logos, word wise/

fervently I pray, forgive thinking you misunderstood
see, I feel you heard our whole storied idea wrong.

The mediating wisdom, truth itself in spirit form, pi
proves infinity we form from wisdom making pi known
so we have precision pivot gem stones in our time pieces

Generated Enemy Mind, the gall, yokes break,
who blames the fastest faster ever methed up?

Set the captives free, we did the needful thing,

we realized we
become more mental, as we age,
we become more like our selves, as seen
on tv

I'm like that guy, digitized self help
back to Norman Vincent Peale,

with proven war service
under every flag that ever flew
over Texas, as claimed by John Wayne,

mind wind
1948, Red River, 2025, enduring
to this end, my wits ending endurance

see that John Wayne, and me, and Jesus,
who comes down from the cross to correct
some wrong thinking mis uses of social authority


to make believe, free mind expanse, free thinking
produces lieve being right minds, used universally,

we can agree when we can use near cognate ideas
behind words, the way Pauli and Jung agree about numbers

and things

attracted to shiny things, oddities,
allowing for recognized movie scenes,
all most all boomers alive today, once saw
John Wayne **** a man from Mexican Texas,

and say to him, It's my land now,
brand'em all, any brand, it's all mine now…

that John Wayne, looks Jesus in the eye, I know
he drawls, he took the formula and became you know
Stupid is as stupid did, he lied,
we listened, he guiled us, we learned and live;
we live with liars, we need not lie, I write all day,
and count it my fair share, picking up trash,
by the freeway, I knew a guy, did that
every day, came
to hear me preach,
once a month, I got the call
in an indian casino, the will
to say sure,

all in.

circa just
before the Civil War, patience
testing all who endured
to the end,
with Trump
in some other people's reality, mine was
in therapy
we teach patience used
to preserve the soul idea,
sticky vessles formed
from unfired final escape clause
riverbottom mud made men
power to imagine peace
for a minute
at thought speed experienced,
in fact, all four Zoas dancing ballet, then riverdance
attempted
at once, Watson Brake, Louisiana,
in time tune
ing
runners carried abalone t
o the desert, and carried points,
obsidian scalpel sharp points
across the sea
of grass,
down the edge
of long ago, past the wells full
from rains

run run run and tell good news,
the circus is coming
to town,
wisdom forms
from schadenfreude Freude woulda loved
to have

known, it is not all about ***.




as beguiling is understood
to mean, I was lied to,
so bemusing is understood
to mean musing use made
classically trained
to amuse
usefull goodness be mazed see
amazing, looking down, see, we knew
we knew what could be known, we saw

those intaglios from the air, Patten broke lines
learned as practical proprioception wind sign eyes
- no secret codes, any thing I say I thunk and knew it

fact check me from let this mind be defined a term

the weapons of my warfare, for which I will admit,
I prayed and fasted for fervently, expertise with these

edges
prepositions mind may achieve indeed, assisted, rules wise wrap around type no ding at the end it frowardly finally wraps, so width of window, experienced today,

from seashore dawn, to even ing notice ing experience ing today

at time speed politically speaking, alienated outlaw inlaws, still, we relate

if your father was a broken man, and you, kinda,
let him see, he broke you,

at thirteen, Boss John Wayne, drawls
let's see kid, who really is that kid sent t
to boarding school in movies.

Did it happen to you, or while you were active
in everything serious upto now.

To do one's duty, love demands definition, hate,
to be fair, has no say, eh, hates is worth nada
ignorance
absence of knowledge believed
to be power, has no power here, today


smell the victory, or petrichor, stoners blood in mud.

as above, so below
or so the story was being told
by the time of the baby boom.

Blessed events and no oil of Croton,
the child would have swallowed, could have,

had she known, ah, holy misconception, may if

only,
we woke this morning and drove in one hour,
give or take a few minutes, fifty miles to sea level,

from where the sun had begun to fill our 4K valley
meadow, wet with dew, begun this day as it were,

except for the freeway, and the Hybrid CVX.

this beautiful a morning as ever has been,
between the divide and the ocean, since ever was
these granite waves I sit on as I write, were ever waves
There. I'm glad you read that, it made it feel balanced

— The End —