asarco.

all plumes and wailing and fever and squeal you
were the city's clanging, hissing antihero
the groaning and grinding of
gears wailing while men marched in the
huge metal belly of you like
ants in ant farms

the smokestacks caterwauled and bellows
whimpered with the rise and fall of a
great empty chest
the fires that roared in the
phosphorus depths in the
circuitous solenoids have since grown
cold like old coffee.  your cold metal frame is
everyone's cold frame oil sticky and seeping everything
smells only like pennies everything
is blood turned to transmission fluid and
blood turned to steel
the cold's teasing fingers pull and
rake at you and the
warm fluid-filled bursa of your heart.

some distant april, against the sad red backdrop of
sunset and a storm coming, dusk creeps in tardy and
fat slow raindrops that sound at once like
applause and so many tears
splash on the steel camber of your dormant walls and
tell us how to pace our mourning for the

giant mass of steel, now silent, and rusting in the rain.