My fingertips asserting soft pressure upon the concrete allow me to feel how cold and damp my city truly is. The weather is obviously a dead give away, but to truly understand something I feel as though the tactile approach gives one a more accurate picture.
Soft fine drops of precipitation strike my hooded jacket as I pass between streetlights, phone boxes, poles with no signs and signs with no poles. The back alleys feel like home. The bohemians, students and junkies pass by adopting a familiar fixed gaze on the cold, grey ground. Nobody speaks to me, not even once. I revel in that. The pretty girls leaving the hidden college and the ugly men sat upon scaffolding, high above the city, like Gods, Angels, workers. Imagine if one just fell.
I hurry my pace past the crowd that gathered, I'm not a fan. The alley gets darker as the time ticks by and I contemplate time ticking by. Lost in transient intermittent thoughts of pasts, futures and presents of each face that solemnly passes by my own stoic masterpiece. I must get out of this drizzle before it begins to pour.
The poor man stops me once more.
I haven't got the change he needs.
It was in a dream that the bearded man came to me.
"You must come down, my son. You do not belong in the skies."
I was often paralysed by such dreams. I guess I still am.
Unable to call for help, afraid of the heights I could reach,
I'm contained by logic even in dreams.
I'm sorry I can't be what is expected. Expectations are often too high. But I still walk with my hood covering my stoic masterpiece. The sun is dead, the stars too. The crowds dispersed, the pretty girls lost their charm and the men descended from their fixtures to reveal themselves as boorish and dim-witted. A personal problem of my own. Junkies are sheltered in their boarded up flats, while the students tap away on gadgets they hate yet cannot live without. The bohemians dance and talk and sing and love.
I continue to walk softly on the coldest and dampest concrete my city has to offer. Unwilling or unable to interfere with the natural balance.
And so the drizzle turns to a downpour,
the poor man still asks for change,
I'm still unable to provide the change he needs.