Artificial city-dwellers
Discard all humanity
Carbon fired tin cans
Pierce the serenity.
Anonymous collisions
Fifty floors below
Each passer by a stranger
You will never know.
Pedestrians, travellers
And their vehicles
Droplets in a river,
Altering the tidal flow.
Irrigation passages
Absorb the elements
Hedge fund panellists,
Bankers and workers flee.
Eye rolling baby boomers
Sit, tutting one by one.
Nervous millennials adorned
In clothes for moths to eat.
Breaking point carriages
Century old tunnelling
A lone foot tapping
And quiet page turning.
Brakes hit the track
Piercing the murmur
Eighty jarred necks
External motion blur.
Sliding carriage doors
A not-so-subtle beep
Dust kicked from dawn
Falls onto the city streets.
Blue tower inhabitants
Busting out of the seams
Water molecules collide
But nothing sinks the fleet.
Smartly suited eye-darters
Push and pull for space
Rolling up the banks
Humanity erased again.
I settle on the brickwork
Until the storm retreats
Circadian commuters
Run to rest their feet.
A few lonely meanders remain
Wondering down the beach
Forlorn festivies fog over
Swinging shop-signs squeak.
As the lighting rig descends
And once blue ceiling stains
The beige brickwork turns red
The high tide admits defeat.
Pink light turns to navy blue
A faint moonbeam lights the sky
Obscured by one cloud then a few
Vague incandescence frames the scene.
The streetlights flicker overhead
One worn out passenger now leaves
Shrouded, cold, hungry and fulfilled;
Abandonment for some is peace.
Kenopsia: The amosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned - a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, an eerie cityscape - making it seem hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
