there is poetry in the city

there is poetry in the city

the city is an art form that mostly doesn’t know it’s making itself

the city is poetry.

poetry isn’t always pretty in the conventional sense, (though it has to be pretty in the sense that on some level you want to read it), and it’s not always moral. it doesn’t necessarily say good things.

stock-photo skylines at detached distances are pleasing and pretty. but close-ups, grime, people in sleeping bags huddled in doorways of closed shops at 1 am, that’s a truer thesis, a reification of globalization but tenements and communicable diseases sure were a thing of the early 20th century as well. or capitalism or something like that.

and, in some sense, to say it is beautiful is not to say that it should not be made history.