Beautiful Pollution

In the dying light, everything is beautiful.
Smokestacks spew fiery incandescence
Into the cool dark sky.


There is beauty in the nameless stolidity
of the warehouses, faceless factories
dotting streets forgotten by all
but the tired souls leaving behind
another day's work and the graffiti guerrillas
Arriving for the nightshift.



Waterways weave
Almost naturally through concrete and crud,
Reflecting oily moonlight as they snake their way to the sea.


Do the tower keepers reflect upon such sites from high above the clouds?
Or do all the cracks and scuff marks, street stencils and the dusty drunks,
The stray kittens and their curious curators*, do all of these meld
into a blurry mass stretching out Eastward, haggard,
an industrial wasteland across the moat?

------------------

*Allow me to show you.
wait, hold on a minute...
Ok cool, now it's on right.

Prior to taking the photos from the poem, I was riding my bike and came upon a dead-end at Newton Creek's edge that told me to stop and stay a while. Not because it was anything near hospitable-looking. To be honest, it was a rather unremarkable dead-end overgrown with virile weeds and and discarded pleasantries. The only point of interest was the sea of Ketel One trucks parked pleasantly together in the lot next door.

Yet something else made me dismount the Green Goblin. Upon venturing through the light brush I discovered a legal dumping zone of sorts, a pipe spewing water into the creek. The prominent plaque above it verified its legality.

The warehouse across the creek looked lonely in the late afternoon.

And the Empire State stood boldly, silently silhouetted against a rosy sky.
And then I saw an SUV pull up right behind my unlocked, nubile bicycle. I started walking to the scene, convinced with 100% certainty that I would have to thwart the theft of my second bicycle in a row. The previous ride was snatched from right inside my front door in Allston. In broad daylight. In a house with six other guys. Now I understand my Dad's amazement when he'd return from a night away to find my bathroom door broken, again, clearly by sheer drunken force during what obviously was a high school party the night before... and I'd have no explanation or excuse, I just didn't know.

Anyway, the driver gets out and opens the back door, at which point a pack of skinny cats materialized from nowhere. The guy then pulls out a couple bags of Burger King and walks into the Ketel One parking lot (without a peep from the security guard) and sits down on the curb to unleash the feast upon the scraggly beasts. As the kittens lapped at milk from makeshift containers and ate what I'm pretty sure was actual Burger King fare, I realized my gut had been right about telling me to stop there.