Single years roll down my face,
I send smoke signals to teenagers
Lost in the sound of their personal midnight,
Changing their names to ‘lost’ and ‘gained’
and remain unquantifiable
in the loose streets of halogen New York,
or the loose streets of halogen anywhere,

Some places you don’t imagine, only experience,
Some places you don’t  visit but get sent,
Some places demand sacrifice of years you don’t have,
Some places are just prayers and graffiti,

And here, here
The railway bridge adorned,
with tags and padlocks
and ****** fluids with different stories,
I see all the streets and city embodied,
She has a face like blunt force trauma,
Her legs are seductive and her hands
are covered in blood,
Her lover’s smile is an open wound.

In these places there is a fire in every tower,
In these places there is something sharp in every pocket,
In these places there is a sad drawing in your child’s notebook,
In these places there is always a ticking growing louder.

A foetus in handcuffs beneath a middle aged man
hanging from a traffic light;
Incidents unrelated,
Become dead words in piles of boxes,
That don’t realise they tell us how
this city or satellite town
is gathering the dirt for its own burial mound.