“Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring.”

• Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Old machinery languishing about,
ceaselessly producing;
billowing useless dark clouds,
sacrificed by the workings inside.
Picture gears and sprockets,
conveyer belts and boxes,
a labyrinth of pipes;
each with gauges no one reads.
Just a wealth of confidence inside
every heart, every heart.

Though – no one goes there.
Not a soul in, nor a soul out.
All the roads bound around that place
lead only anywhere else
and even so, there are no grounds
on which to drive up, stop and contemplate.
Just a large barbed fence
to keep the curious out.
But always, the aesthetic eye
to love will come.

For it is at once the landscape
and that which defines the horizon,
reaching out for the cosmos
as Tantalus for the peach;
confined in a prison of industry
crying out black sooted protests.
Giving back nothing aside what the eye can see
observed from the periphery.
It will find empathy,
but like a refugee.

None know its architect,
nor will any pursue such details.
Those secrets will die in the warm steel nails
that first hammered in all those walls;
in the mortar that bound the brick to silence.
It is known only that it exists,
the eternal workings always singing
yet growing quieter each year;
While I return its gaze and insist,
ring the bells that still can ring.