Alone (in the crowd)

Alone (in the Crowd) link

Chicago
was like so many towns
strung together into rooms
with loners behind walls
that are like so many walls.

Love is at a specified place and time,
or auntie June at a summer reunion
at a picnic table under the sun,
but loneliness is anywhere,
like ubiquity or the void,
and beyond time.

Love and loneliness in this space called Chicago.
The town was grey like graves,
and cold,
windy when cold,
and grey like busy death.

I missed the skin of it:
I tasted the food but not the best food,
I saw books but not the famous ones,
got drunk on cheap wine and loved people I’ll never love again.

Else I walked the streets and talked to no one.

I bet you missed it too,
and why not?
Beauty fills the eye
and converses with the mind
and is forgotten like a perfect stranger.

Chicago is just another building in Paris.
The world is outside
and the universe has heartburn, dementia, and dysentery and is trapped in this cubbyhole.

I am just on the other side of that wall. .

I am my antonym.

I am paranoid like God, and jealous.

I’ll defile myself in a rash of murder and grace.

I am walled in and therefore everywhere,
and I was God until you interrupted me.

Can you see it yet,
that even in the smallest darkness there is confined infinity?

Can you not see that to be alone is to be God and that God is alone?

The hotel costs 59 a night.