Two Poems by Michael Lee Johnson
Photography by Mick Davidson
South Chicago Night and Day
Night is drifters,
sugar rats, street walkers, pick-pockets, pimps,
insects, Lake Michigan perch,
neon signs blinking half the bulbs
burned out.
In the warmth of morning sun, lips grinning,
sidewalks folding open,
the big city drifts, and sailboats
lean against the Lake Michigan sand.
-2009
***
I Trip on My Poems
In the night when poems
are born, I search for the hidden words,
secrets stretch inside my metaphors.
Even near my tender moments
when the images blossom into rain flowers
I trip on stems cut my way loose to nowhere.
I go there to see what I can find.
-2008
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Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer and small business owner of custom imprinted promotional products and apparel: www.promoman.us, from Itasca, Illinois. He is heavily influenced by: Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Allen Ginsberg. His new poetry chapbook with pictures, titled From Which Place the Morning Rises, and his new photo version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom are available at: http://stores.lulu.com/promomanusa.
Love the atmosphere you conjure up in South Chicago Night and Day, and especially the last two lines. Beautifully observed.
Beautiful poems- love especially the rhythm in the sugar rats line of South Chicago, the image of “tripping over stems cut loose to nowhere” in the second poem.