Chicago In Dreams

I took the 56 bus downtown  to a place once real,  or at least in imagination.  The flat windows and cold steel  that scraped against the winter sky  felt like human parking lots  hanging over the abandoned shoulders  of people running back and forth,  while the homeless sold newspapers  no one cared enough to read.  A city lived only in imaginations  by people without imaginations.  I talked to old friends along a dirty river  about nothing about a reoccurring past,  their names slowly forgotten, names whitewashed  into a tapestry of post-industrial bliss.  I followed an address to my childhood:  an empty void with escaping memories  blowing in the lake effect wind.  And when I awoke  I walked forward... because  there was no where else to go;  tears were not worth the trouble.