Chicago

The euphonic music encapsulates my prickled skin and tousles my hair. A sinfully sweet, tart treat, a rarity of beauty in the district of packing meat, did we meet before? Is truly meeting someone an impossible feat? Who are we meeting at first glance? The hero, the villain? An impossible savior and an animal, a killer, a demure wanderer fearful of the night that’s not quite the night but now the graceful, differential morn?

I wandered in and took a seat. The area is desolate, and incomplete. But down these stairs, the basement below the garage, is life, limited, spiritual, preposterous life. I walk in, decked in the gut with a wave of heat and light and sound, pure, glorious sound, nothing vain about it. It waltzes and wallows and simpers and sits. I sit and watch those around me. They sit adroit at an aeneous bar, sipping brown drinks with pink stirrers and orange napkins.

The waitress is faceless, nameless, and hands me a vivid green drink that smells like almonds and medicinal alcohol and I take a sip to be polite and almost faint, the music so powerful now it reminds of the way wrecking balls caress the side of a damned diner before swinging back and thereafter taking its life.  

The place has an unmistakable allure. Warm orange lighting, dark patrons, shadowed by some obscure, intangible feeling of lust and love and loss. My mind has made heads of the music by now-- expressive, rebellious, caramelized jazz. It’s ambrosial, it causes apostasy, it’s ecstasy, dear irreverent severance of a servant one cannot lose. I do not need to be cognizant of the song’s name, I simply know it will become my epitaph.

Tell me, tell me the arduous truth. You can preach it to the choir but can you coax, confess, attest to the damned? There are those who listen, and those who make. There are those who listen, and those who take. Take it from me, take me from here, before another tear auditions to be the one who breaks me, stake me, do you even realize what’s at stake? Clotted, mottled, besotted and rotted wrought on the distraught matron, matronly mess of mistakes and earthquakes only felt here in this mansion, in this maison, in this heathenistic, Hellenistic regurgitated aftermath of a sweat that drowns those who ache and quake and shake like rabid dogs or rabbits that dodge amongst the hodgepodge of holes and freshly overturned earth.

The sound is gravelly as it gravitates towards me, I feel it pulsate like a human heart aglow in the merriment of watching the world turn and turn and twist and turn. I begin to feel myself fall--fall asleep, fall apart, there is no difference.

The music reminds of a voice I used to hear, in my dreams, maybe in reality, I really cannot say at this point, all I know is I feel nostalgic and I drink to nostalgia, I drink to the past passionates, the past revolutionaries, the past caricatures of me, myself and I. The past is so warm right now, I’m so warm, too warm and trusting. Too warm and something.

The espresso machine whirls to life and startles me out of my bricked in conviction. The sound is chilling and I come to the realization that although it still whips and cracks through my mind, the music has ceased and the patrons have resolved themselves entirely to the darkness. I am alone.