Somewhere in the 21st Century.

I was there when we won.
I saw Chicago glowing through its lonely terror,
illuminated and hopeful though aching and cold,
clear-eyed through the acrid smoke of the defeats of the past,
free enough at last to shatter the four walls of chances hamstrung by history.

I was there when we won
and, love drunk, saw my city:
(beautiful in its fire flowers),
terrible and terrorizing to the nightmares of oil and money;
pulsing veins full of America (which is pure light)
flooding the subways, bursting above ground, fire though the sky on L tracks.
alive and holy and changed and charged,
tested tortured tempered
unafraid;
human with hearts full of rose thorns and language and razor wire tongues on lilac pallets at doorways out of alleys at polls irrigating deserts
flash flooding laugh lines with the majesty of youth and poems lived instead of read.
Perfect.

I saw my city recalling with a wretch the near decade of law laid low;
of money-clutching claws stained crimson
With power, collected at any cost.
Remembered how the fix of fear dilated our pupils
and how some of us never sobered up enough to stop it.
Remembered thinking that freedom is like language; you aren't human if you lose it,
and wondered what monster it made us to let it go
without even one Molotov cocktail for a chaser, but came around in love to see my city beginning the revolution here at home:
rejecting at last the skinny-jeaned trust-funded cocained over-sexed decadent apathy of Wicker Park's carefully crafted irony.

I was there when we won.
I saw Grant Park's million-headed hydra scream at the signal when it came
and understood at once the meaning:
The Death
The Wheel brought
The World laid low by
The Emperor multiplied by
Strength.

I was there when we won.
I saw my city sing,
called my father and cried a bit and
waited for the wave to come.