On the campus district Up the street from the theater district Down the road from University Circle

I have always been of two minds Playhouse and public square all theater Up the road is where curiosity goes Building on strong foundations Not remembering our intentions Even those engraved colossal We were searching for more answers Now afraid of own questions The physics is simple Down the road the strength of presence is all that matters An ecosystem true energy no one is creating With limits and geography Imagine all the cereal Aisles in all the Walmarts 10,000 strong Difficult to comprehend how long would it take to walk all those aisles You would come to and end and wonder where you had been I feel equally at home anywhere along my road I can quite imagine the titans planning their day I pass the fine arts building and marvel the opulence I have been well educated I have done my own research Up the road reality is objective What I find most comforting Ideas battle in motion In times bad ones win many battles What I found when I looked for myself No one ever tells you what they fo...

Has anybody ever made you drink? No one can make you drink I make a choice I seldom make Odd the pace of this World Series are contested near by Often the weather forecast overstated Which model did they follow? Neither seem close today The home teams wins They do not have a bike lane The tourists can not pronounce the name of the street I imagined I have a rear view mirror I remember the choices I make I do not drink much Each sip a reason Insane the pace Then waiting Each year another What is attractive the oddness From so many walks of life collided She had work to do and I had nothing better to do

I'm writing this from Mather's gardens, in what's left of a mansion built by iron ore money in 1910. Samuel Mather's fortune came from extracting resources—pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them, selling them, repeating until the wealth became incomprehensible. He was a steam locomotive running down the track. You didn't negotiate with him. You got out of the way or you got run over. He built this place to show it off. So did Rockefeller down the street. So did all of them, lined up along what was called Millionaires Row. You've never heard of it. That's fine. Nobody has. The mansions are mostly gone now. Torn down, repurposed, carved into administrative offices. Cleveland State University squats on the former estates. The churches the millionaires built to launder their guilt through stained glass are still here—I can see five of them from where I sit. The universities they endowed, the museums, the theaters, the whole cultural apparatus of Uni...