'Lucid' Living

Little Fred is intermittently drooling on his chin and asking if someone can open his smokes in between mumbles of your so cute and do you have sixty cents? I really need sixty cents. No one can give him change because when we look at Little Fred we see a broken nose through dirty city windows and we know how drunk he got on another sucker’s jingle.

Pockets empty I can open the smokes but can’t force myself to stand close enough to excuse him for being human. Then the subway overhead chimes like church and the doors close. I can’t stop looking for the bus.

I need directions here. There isn’t enough time to get lost because walking costs. My cold is getting worse and I can only buy so many coffees until one café can print the narcissistic claims of my past—my resume. Look at every suit and say: I’m fucking awesome, hire me. That’s what I want to do, but know I won’t because that might never work—nobody wants to hire a failure.

 I’ve found a place with endless alleys to explore but I’ve lost my voice in the hollowness, in this echo of: bin man machines, high beams, honks, ice cold cigarette smokers, their smoke, buskers, other people screaming at brick walls.

Newsstands and flutes are his bag. They’re not in it, just what he does. He rarely speaks, but the blue eyes behind his Santy beard tell stories in a glance. Glances that lend to ‘moments’ ; in Logan Square on the Spaulding side of street downstairs towards the blue line to here or there. Same song every time I walk by, it seems, but I don’t know the notes or have patience to pay attention.

There is where I’m going: The Empty Bottle. Not because I drank it but because there’s music and plaid shirts and dollar-fifty beers. Floridians are waiting for me off Western. I wonder what Saiid would say.

Drinking the cheapest red in a skeleton mug by the Christmas tree in January. Location seems to be what matters. Geographically speaking I’m on a plain near a lake somewhere in an alleyway chasing my voice. Looking for the first place I made an echo so I can stop the noise, capture it in a glass like Lightning bugs, put the glass near my bed, and sleep while the sound suffocates itself. But I’m here. Still hunting for reverberation when instead I should know that everything changes and only skeletons will stay.