Something blossoms, something dies. I see Chicago tonight in the parlor where my father had seen the stars, my mother the sun, my brothers the cosmic portrait  through a trembling kaleidoscope snug within the paper fortress. I see Chicago lit up like a luminescent baton falling in the glass bowl of my morning, stumbling down the orange and yellow, mumbling within the orbit of a somber Monday. I walk outside. Children like oysters swaying in the grey parade; howling echoes spread atop the gut table. My hands are his hands are their hands are our hands- it is the same from under any waterfall. It is the same sheen of anothers eyes, pushing atop the mirror until the reflection is softened atop a throne of tangible dreams drawn with the imagination. Of the old way, I yawn. Chicago like a painted diamond whose wrinkled palm holds the rivers of my silk hopes, in the morning, rising like a drunken sun. I stumble, humbly along. Wither hath fled thy visionary gleam? It is a vision I have had, it is a vision within a vision, framed within the restless closet where the radio silently weeps. I believe in a city; I believe in a possibility- the alembic of my life suspended from above a jar of teardrops. Chicago standing beneath the marvelous kiss of industrialization, the sound of a steel eclipse, the people coming and going, walking snugly shoulder to shoulder in the bellowing cavernous streets. I see the train break the air like water upon a shore, I see the women, tall and bright, the portrait of a lady, composed of the collective sounds of words I had only imagined to be words; the outline of their silhouette like a thousand raindrops suspended in the freckled way the sun falls in-between the buildings, buildings like heavenly trees which shimmer in the shadows as you walk by, lost in the way one becomes another- are we not that similar no matter how many cities have fallen? When it snows it is beautiful the way the aspect of the world is changed as we all brush the flakes as they land upon us, the way our arms all do the same instinctual thing. I see Chicago in the form of a story, sitting within the amber fish tank wrapped within the fog of a moment held captive within my mind. I see the timeline of my life falling short of an hour, I see the history of my life before it is over, embalmed within a shadowbox, I see my voice as it rolls over a canyon, I see my eyes as they close for once as something blossoms.