in the damages

God, my dear, is in the damages.

"30 Delft Tiles," Mark Doty

[Damen Avenue below Chicago Avenue]

after a while

The rain, after three days of uninterrupted sovereignty, had stopped for the time. The sky cleared after a while and the stars came out.

"The Man Who Killed Dan Odams," Dashiell Hammett

[Chicago Avenue at Damen Avenue]

hard to explain to anyone

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it's hard to explain to anyone
how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough
simply to exist

~ Pessoa

[Ukrainian Village above Augusta Boulevard.]

where you're to sleep

Here's where you're to sleep
The sheets are still clean
They're only been slept in once.

"The Impact of the Cities," Bertolt Brecht

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

after each sudden swerve or rubbery squeal

just terribly, but humorously sang
Jonathan Richman's 'Stop This Car' after each sudden

swerve or rubbery squeal. Once they discussed
the pros and cons of having sex

with Bob Dylan–or a Bob Dylan look-alike–in a Buick
while listening to 'From a Buick 6'.

Black fumes billowed from the exhaust, and by a species
of dead reckoning they charted, in a road atlas, detours

and punctures, losses and gains–all
the time wondering whether (as Van Morrison once

sang) to 'Hardnose
the Highway' were the same as to live.

"They Drove, Mark Ford

[Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue]

i've never had the right words to describe my life

"Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."

"Middlesex," Jeffrey Eugenides

[Damen Avenue above Haddon Street]

that lost year's first snow

The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and Division and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups... Their friendship had kindled on a winter night two years before Pearl Harbor when Sparrow had first drifted, with that lost year's first snow, out of a lightless, snow-banked alley onto a littered and lighted street.

"The Man With The Golden Arm," Nelson Algren

[West Chicago Avenue east of Damen Avenue]

float backwards

People kissing stop to sigh then kiss
again.
Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed
forever.
Flowers sigh and two noon bees
float backwards.

"Guillermo's Sigh Symphony," Anne Carson

[Damen Avenue at Augusta Boulevard]

beauties have come

Be silent! Spring is here! The rose is dancing with its thorn.
Beauties have come from the Invisible to call you home.

"Give Me Ecstacy," Rumi, trans. Andrew Harvey

[Chicago Avenue west of California Avenue]

they ask themselves

"Some men are above the law."
"But how do they know who they are?"
"They ask themselves."

"Pickpocket," Robert Bresson

[Damen Avenue below Augusta Boulevard]

i want to hear the true story, essentially

“The notion that anything can be invented wholly and these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially."

~ James Salter, Paris Review Interview No. 133

[Damen Avenue below Division Street]