My Stop is Grand

I have no illusion some fusion of force and form will save me, bewilderment of bonelight ungrave me as when the El shooting through a hell of ratty alleys where nothing thrives but soot and the ratlike lives that have learned to eat it screechingly peacocked a grace of sparks so far out and above the fast curve that jostled and fastened us into a single shock of— I will not call it love but at least some brief and no doubt illusionary belief that in one surge of brain we were all seeing one thing: a lone unearned loveliness struck from an iron pain. Already it was gone. Already it was bone, the gray sky and the encroaching skyline pecked so clean by raptor night I shuddered at the cold gleam we hurtled toward like some insentient herd plunging underground at Clark and Division. And yet all that day I had a kind of vision that's never gone completely away of immense clear-paned towers and endlessly expendable hours through which I walked teeming human streets, filled with a shine that was most intimately me and not mine.