Cities Don’t Make Sense
Visionary travelers can’t resist
seeing themselves living
in every new city that they trade steps
for memories they won’t want to recall.
Such a concentration of people it takes
to lose ourselves among
everyone and everything else!
Depending on their length of stay,
the realization always hits them
around the time their imagination dissipates
like the retreating steam of rain in summer
on the beleaguered pavements there.
So many great things can only exist together
for as long as it takes to acknowledge the work it took
to bring them within each other’s orbit.
These transient entities
wrapped in their delusions
ask only of how they could
bring about their visions
instead of questioning
why they should even want
something best distilled
in doses they can control.
Discussions of cities seem only to follow
concepts of congestion and collapse and calamity
after opportunities for gathering and engagement.
When these travelers come to the end
of their thought-journeys of haven-harbors,
the fleeting prospect that
cities don’t make sense
doesn’t matter when they know
that these constructions
don’t need to coalesce
in the minds of those within
as long as they remain
magnets for both good and bad.
So the miracles continue to stew
around the centers of our human hearts each day
that our cities prove that we can build domes of kindness against the world.
