FUN FACTS ABOUT PITTSBURGH
Perhaps if the place hadn't been so grey,
so colored of winter and despair, so grimed
I might have seen it as you did: nuanced and shadowed,
draped in concrete ambiguity, and studded with impossibilities.
Instead I saw the place used and abandoned, romantic
as a stained and discarded styrofoam coffee cup.
I saw from the outside in what you saw from the inside out:
The outsized opulence the place couldn't quite sustain,
the green dreams and purple aspirations,
the authenticitity at any cost.
Perhaps I would have seen it sooner had I suffered your affliction.
Had I seen it
through your pain-stricken eyes,
from the other side of your soul-deep headache,
from the depths of your cringing pain.
Had I lived the day-to-day despair
in that great, greasy, gray-green place
Perhaps I would have seen the tragic beauty sooner,
clearer,
more like something God had made.