CHICAGO: A FRAGMENT

...and we talk of the Swede Carl

Sandburg's Chicago,

two hundred murders a year

on streets where trams, trains and horses

and a few thousand cars

crawled forth in a sea of European immigrants;

not one in four third-generation

in the great crossroad town

of rivers and railroads, dreaming

of endless growth, the emporium

of the West on the shore of its own Sea

and the future... Upton Sinclair's

Jungle where men and beasts

mingled in blood and the bloodiest

beasts climbed the skyscrapers

to the heaven of power long before Al

Capone with his syphilis wrecked body and mind

came along, not the cause

but a symptom, a parasite on a gargantuan Leviathan

gasping on the shore of its sea

it devoured with new neighbourhoods,

more museums and army garrisons to make money safe

from those that toiled for it, City Beautiful

for men in smoky rooms, long mustaches and long beards,

their tentacles running like their great Haussmannian boulevards

along the canyons where like sick and defouled river

the masses ran and were run over by cars, trams, trains and horses

and the power of the men looking down from their Olympian heights,

seeing nothing of the weary, dirty ants they

crushed with one step of their collective greed....

08.03.2019