Urbeosis

I

Night unwraps the entire sky
just over there, at the center
of this declining pit, its mystique

entrancing and disappointing
together, twin beings of thought
and feeling like dancing passersby.

The harder you squint into its
arrowed distance, the softer the
image becomes; the rough steel

girders elongate, forms of towering
phalli, looking like the flaked ooze of
dry candles once topped with flame,

now donned with sparkled but blurred
reflections, and though out of nothing,
deep and colorful scars shine back

a minuscule image of us, and our
visions become tired and strained
beneath the proportions of this grid..

II

Over there it was the same thing, earlier.
It haunted about before me as a black
and red place from long ago, from

when my feet treaded within it for the
first time, shoes wearied from other towns
traveled first, the other soaked roads.

This malformed day was a day of the
unsung climate, a day of a trip to the new
and to the old, neighborhoods both

crumbling and building through all
the dust. Perhaps I should have shut
my eyes and gone home instead, to let the

ideas rot from within not from without.
But the true Other haunting me is not
only mechanical; though this ghost has

two arms, two legs, a heaving breath
and hair that hangs straight down like
daggers, then there is that old dance

she shares with her Other—that symbiosis
truly of death through water, the drowning
of those who have come and those gone,

and how the anger, this bright excision,
collaborates with the streets, expands
as in an artful bubble, or lack of taste.