Approachable Pedestrian
by Bradley David
Approachable Pedestrian
Great for strangers getting off the
L, struggling maps for north
Western Ave or west North Ave
Blue Line dumping us off on a
spinning compass Up dirty tiles and
salty steps to solar flares Blue mailboxes
shrugging dogs off their legs
I always had trouble with Wicker Park
Looked like a tourist on my own block
Don’t rob me I already can’t make sense of this
Part of my therapy is accepting cities Their
existence Their morphology The way
they change So quickly You’d think they
change slowly like their policies But crime
goes up overnight Like rising policies
Like bad architecture It’s not architecture It’s
plywood giving plywood a bad name
Stronger than condos Guilty by association
My space in the Flatiron was sure some
crazy intersection Across from Stan’s
square donuts filled with what? Biscoff?
Like a United flight? Like United Center
off Blue Line off Medical Center Just a hair pull
down Fig to United Field So much is united
now that so much is disjointed Like chocolate-backed Biscoff
from the Asian market in Alhambra Now that’s an
approachable poet laureate That’ll pull your teeth
through a blissful six month survival
This full-circle donut didn’t mess with edges
That live-work wedge on North Ave was a
magnificent mix of freaks Queer dolls
pulling themselves toward fire escapes
with real teeth Foiled ghosts and
communal showers for lost flip-flops
Sticky cagey elevator Brass mail slots
Spiney drunks snoring into a marble echo
Maintenance showed me a place
more dark and dust than room Which is often
appealing but creepy when the occupant isn’t dead
Yet He said I could paint He’d even empty the ash tray
That wouldn’t take the smell away You can’t
paint over death once you know it’s
looking over your shoulder Grading
your papers and disagreeing with your furniture
People die I get it Places go up for rent
But they do have to die first and then of course
rents go up So I grabbed a small space with
no obvious stories
fresh paint and old hardwood The kind of varnish
that stinks like cat piss I don’t mind My grandfather
worked in a flooring mill Other grandfather
romanced sliced lumber like wedding cake and
slaughtered cat-piss spruce like it gave him life
Once a tractor sank in the mud irretrievably invisibly
So tractor became trail and trail became rust and
rust became clay and clay became pot and
pot met our gaze We saw tractor in its luster like
the eyes of grandfathers We ought to pave our
next mess with Bimmers and Mercedes
I wish I’d thought of that at the time
I might have lied and told the tired keychain that
grandfather cut and milled that floor He might have
cut me a break with that old line
I would say wood is in my blood And
when you’re running out of trees
it feels like you’re coursing with splinters
Your heart flutters with nowhere for the birds
Hard to imagine a hometown Stripped of pine
exporting basketball court floors And in Chicago
just down the road the leather factory made
Superbowl footballs I don’t care about sports
I care about trees And I think about old floors
after those grand buildings endure renovation For
the greater good or some such fib Like safety
I’m beginning to hate gray
Warmth is still out of style Try adding it to your
poetry and pottery See how that lump gets swallowed
They’ll say the work lacks the modernism
that obfuscates obvious angles Hardwood should
look like laminate Durable and consistent Poetry should
look like pottery Shattered and spilling content But
arranged Glued and grouted And a stranger
should be stranger and it’s cool to look confused
Not too mapped or approachable or pedestrian But
I wouldn’t dare put words to pottery
and old floors still look alive
And I’m not complaining
About the dead
I love the sound of it all
Bradley David’s poetry and prose appear in Plainsongs, SEISMA, Porridge Magazine, Stone of Madness, Epoch Press, and Spuyten Duyvil Dispatches Editions. New work is forthcoming in Fruit Journal, Milk & Cake Press, Torrey House Press, and Sagging Meniscus Press.
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