Berkeley Avenlue
Errol Miller
“I give you simply what you have already ...”
Robert Lowell
The villain is always with us,
dragging us down eternally wasted city streets,
our minds rather clogged with The Blues.
Children of sorrow, we come over to each other’s
houses for hysterical visits, we nod and moan
and carry on, concluding the truth is much too wron(g.
Criticism is better, and little cold wars trapping
the visitors in murky mine-shafts filled
with laughing gas and electronic images of
nameless major league players attempting to steal honie.
A few common threads run through it all: there
is no higher ground, no chance of retreat, no plane
out of here until Wednesday morning. You know
how it is to have sanctions placed against yoil.
You know how it is to toss and turn in grey
flannel nightmares where rigid characters
demand things in their places.
Culture, a massive chasm stagnant with life’s problems,
sophisticated parts and pieces of a family puzzle warped by
the passage of time and phony voices on the telephone
inviting you up for a cheery visit. The crowd
did not warm up to my poetry or Sashals beautiful
pink expressions, me&my girl, we collected
debris for psychoanalysis, losing
our common sensibility. She was still
the loveliest angel to me, standing
classicly alone with me by the railway,
trying to defuse this lunatic encounter as something
rather pointless and out of order. We are sick
of the cosmopolitan Midwest, of Chicago’s
“terrific” relatives wearing esoteric powdered wigs.
Let them fall back into their own oncoming winter
of discontent and reflect on spiritual possibilities.
Let them tap into the creative forces of th6 Art Institute,
let them study urban graffiti and reassemble
their desperate conforming lives.
Tonight we’ll go on breaking bread
and drinking red wine, not a brakeman on the El can
stop this awful regimen of tricks, alien brothers
and sisters seated around an enormous wooden table,
wandering back into lush Ray Bradbury stories
of a more transquil time and place, avoiding
the unraveling of family ties as the wine
runs out and a dark star rises outside
on Berkeley Avenue.
