Montgomery Park

A gargantuan skull -- cavernous,
with walls as pale as bleached bone,
towers ten stories tall,
stares thirty eyes wide
above west Baltimore's squalor,
beside a road rushing with cars.

Years ago, her warehouse floors
fell silent, her windows hazed over
by too many seasons of neglect.
The beast crumbled slowly into ruin,
metal framework weeping rust.

Until some Moneybags Visionary
gutted her rotting entrails,
blasted her bricks clean with steam,
sprayed her stones blinding white.
They hauled away her wreckage
in diesel-breathing trucks,
left behind a polished shell
picked clean but starved for carpet,
drywall, plumbing, wire.

The resurrective genii, 
as small as ants beside the hulk,
worked their reconstructive magic
of concrete, glass, plaster surgery,
transforming from the inside out.
Only the ribs and backbone from her first
incarnation remained, and, of course,
those big square holes for eyes...

On a chilly winter's night, clammy
with rain, her re-tubed neon lights
crackled, sizzled back to life like
Frankenstein's jigsaw puzzle brainchild.
Huge, story-tall, orange neon
letters hummed and glowed a mile
from the city's mirror-smooth center.

Montgomery Park climbed out of her own grave,
as, one by one, her eyes switched bright
from black to white tinged with lavender.
"Floor Space For Rent," read the billboard 
outside her front doors, in a newly paved lot
reeking of asphalt, etched fresh
with evenly spaced white lines.

Scott Speck
06/30/2003