Looking down at the city from a broken bedroom window, above an empty church with a pot-belly broiler on fire, heating the whole place up and beckoning soft tapestries to dance, seductively in the hallways

Jade colored lights strung above asphalt shout:
GO!

And we do, down abandoned streets, past broken window homes where red bricks stand wobbly with their seams unfastening

Industrial Cauldron Collapse
My City
Deserted Concrete Jungle
Cass Corridor Night

Empty Avenues where furry cat-tail heads push through pavement
to breath polluted air
that they purify
with each exhalation

Defiant cat-tail communities gathering, in mildewy shadows cast by buildings old and crumbly, stinking of earthy musk and resin,
like bunches of wild squatter punks living rent free and on the margins

Growing, by any means necessary, in the setting that circumstance demands, on unlikely substrates of tar and gravel, where the watering is done by the hands of winos

and the roots are fertilized by the successive shedding of each layer of conditioning

as is the soil, by Birch leaves dropped in fall

Home to galaxies of bugs, crash pad of song birds, hide out of frogs, tenting place of unshaven lovers, trembling with winter city cold and
excitement

Refugia for the feral
Chaotic source of inspiration amidst the ordered grid pattern of city streets
Confronting, by their very existence, the idea of domesticity itself

A single patch of green, cross pollinating, whenever possible, with any amiable spore blown in by the wind, or carried inadvertently, hobo style, on an Amtrak grain car

Cat-tail flower heads pointing skyward!

Maybe take over the whole city someday!

When the wind that blew their seeds far and wide

shifts

And blows them back from which they came.