The Big City and the Farm

       The big city is difficult. Chicago. A few blocks West, underslung teenage boys lord over the summertime nighttime streets. Cops roar around with sirens and billy clubs. A few blocks East, the streets ooze with college-grads. They’re like me, looking for something real, but more self-conscious, affected, apathetic, and snootier than me. (Ha ha. Ha ha ha.) The big city is cynical.
       Some people swim down the streets, hurdling past bad glances like misplaced chairs in their own livingrooms. Others choke on air. They carry the weight of the magical sinking concrete carpet in their impotent hearts, knowing they could never save the place enough. They couldn’t even get to a decent grocery store on bike. The big city is scary. Someone’s always taking something from someone else, (in the decayed heart of the ghetto, and on the frilly bankroll edges of the Mayor’s paw print) even if they don’t mean to. You’ve got to pick your fistful of spaces and let peace be with you.
       (To be happy, same as everywhere, you got to be tough. To have a love that reaches unseen. To be a tree. A tower. A forest. A skyline. A bird. An airplane. To be real, whatever that means, to get it, real heart beating real blood up through your real throat, into your true thoughts.)

       There’s no sounds tonight on the farm. It’s forty degrees and misty. Today, I planted eight grape vines, three apple trees, and three cherry trees. I rammed a seventeen-pound rod into the Earth, repeatedly. Breaking up the soil, crushing the rocks. After Lindsey, and perhaps the spirit of the Grandmother tree on the Eastern hill, my shoulders are the biggest on the farm.
       After work, I walked the perimeter of the farm. I went through a marshy patch. Green and wet. A bluebird flew up from my knees. A tuft of purple flowers wagged along a fence-line.

       Why sweat over the Earth if its going to get eaten up by the sun, anyways? Why sweat over a lover?

       A New York city taxi-cab unionist baths in a flood of parking tickets, and obsesses over the white man in the mirror, moving in across the African street. Carrots grow plump and orange in the deep black Wisconsin soil. Flea beetles plot against the arugula, and hungry deer wet-dream over crisp rows of lettuce.