I’m sitting here in my apartment on the outskirts of Tbilisi, Georgia tonight, listening to people screaming and yelling at one another.  To my uncomprehending ears, it sounds like a dreadful domestic dispute, and I feel helpless.  In my memory, I am catapulted back to my time in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, where Friday nights were loud and raucous.

Here is an untitled poem in three parts that I wrote about one particularly memorable weekend night in my neighborhood.

The 4800 block of S. Damen in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood.

I.
It’s two forty-three in the morning and I’m peacefully reading in my living room when suddenly I hear a crash and pull the blinds to see a red P.T. Cruiser with a broken axle stumble down the street and then it lurches round the corner and parallel parks behind my car and bumps my bumper and I find out later that it leaves three little crescent-shaped indentations from its license plate. The man inside the car tries to stagger out but slumps back into the bucket seat in a drunken daze so I call nine-one-one and wait and wait for twenty-nine minutes for the authorities to arrive and when the first squad shrieks onto the scene a black cop slides out of the car and takes a statement from me and then he talks to his white partner and they bark at the drunk in the Plymouth and call for backup because he doesn’t speak a word of English – or he pretends not to.

II.
Two more squads show up with blinking lights and squalling sirens and all the cops collect in the street yakking and snorting and one of them gnaws on the stump of a cigar and they look dangerous even though they are cops and then a Mexican cop advances on the drunk guy and the white guys make jokes about spics and braisers and wet-backs and they insist the drunk guy won’t have insurance because he is probably illegal but they find his drivers license and he does have insurance and they are surprised and then I see the drunk trying to dial his cell phone until one of the cops—not the cigar-gnawer—stalks over and grabs the phone and flings it onto the railroad tracks and then the drunk guy wobbles out of his red car and sways in the middle of the street near the cops and I turn my head and the next thing I hear is a wet splat and I whirl back and see the drunk guy laying on his face in the street and a puddle of inky blood pools about his face and one of the cops—not the black one—announces that he tripped when he got out of his car.

III.
The cops taunt him and show off and act cool like a pack of bullies on a grade-school playground and the cigar-gnawer hands me an accident report and they pile into their cars to drive away until I stop them and say hey aren’t you going to arrest the drunk guy and they say no and I question them until they explain that the jails are full tonight and we don’t want to waste our time bringing in one more drunk Mexican and they start to leave again until I stop them again and say you can’t leave a bleeding drunk guy lying in the middle of the street and they complain but slink from their cars and put on latex gloves so they won’t soil their hands with blood and they yank him over the blacktop with his arm dragging and they fling him onto the grass and he slumps over and passes out and now his arm looks like minced meat and face is covered in blood and his eyes are swollen shut and as soon as they leave I again call nine-one-one—this time for an ambulance—and I am sorry I ever called the police.