Inside me is a playground, is a factory.
Inside me is a cipher of decay.
I am sometimes a vehicle for absorbing wealth.
I feel daily like I have to defend myself.
Inside me is inbred chaos.
Inside me is America’s greatest manufacturing experience.
Inside me is an assembly line four miles long
where the workers who build products
are themselves interchangeable parts.
Inside me is a big blue Cadillac.
Inside me is a shrunken footprint.
Inside me are things that are not relevant
to anyone’s idea of a civilization in ruins—
a moment of consolation, a transitory
slideshow, a centerfold.
Inside me is someone saying we will
rebuild this city. Inside me is the legacy
of tanks rolling down the Boulevard,
an arsenal of scrapped schools
with graffiti on the doors—
I’m Alone 
I have Lost
my children.
Skys Tha Limit.
Inside me I’ve got
a window
where my heart is
but we hope for better things.
If we don’t act so bad, they won’t close the school.
If you close the school, there’s nothing here.
Inside me is the fate of a neighborhood.
And something hard that refuses to die.
Can I fit through that hole?
Inside me they’ve left everything behind:
maps, test tubes, disintegrating plaster,
bent rebar, torn conveyor belts
where three guys worked the engine
and one guy turned the crank.
I was an autoworker for 33 years,
she said, and you learn your job so well
that it looks like you’re part of the line,
it looks like you’re dancing, like the guy alone
on John R Street outside his black sedan—
August night and his car doors open,
music pouring out, doing a graceful
running man. I want to tell him
about the lost colony, the people
that landed and vanished inside me.
And this photographer I talked to
on the phone who thinks Detroit
is still on her way down, hasn’t hit
bottom. But there’s Harmonica Shah
in his overalls in a lot on the corner
of Frederick and St. Aubin singing
if you don’t like the blues, you got a hole
in your soul. If you don’t like the blues,
go home.