Ah, the imposing skeletons shooting their eternal fires skyward and the scoured brown fields. Blue flame licking the muddled sky, scarlet with the waning reflections of human refuse. The thrush of interstate arteries, and the somatic city noise: bass heavy beats and the elevated tram, impatient car horns and a distant shout, angry lovers or a neighborhood quarrel. The old mills with their stone-holed windows and the men in the street corner bars with their myths. The Western Unions and the neon translucence, Liquor, Women, Cigarettes. Men wandering the blinking avenues humming the old refrains, the lost girls and the lost pensions and the family fractured a thousand ways – the drunks, the adulterers, the aggrieved, and nobody quite as innocent as they believe. Somewhere a piano melody, faint, a door opening and closing, and a jingle riding a small wave of laughter, breaking apart, dispersing like a curl of smoke. What is this predilection towards ruin that follows our species? Why is there such a haunting beauty in the corpse of this city? A man pursues ease and fast pleasure. The methods of our time: convenience and efficiency. A man walks down the garbage strewn lots of his childhood. He hears echoes. He breaks into a run and feels his muscles strain and his bones grind and his heart wail. Ceaseless, the refineries ravage their carbon wives, and the skies of Detroit burn with a luminescent fury, the smoldering penance of a species incapacitated by desire.