#nnn
Contemplating ************
I lie on my crookedly back
on a lumpy mattress
with curves in all the wrong places,
studying the ceiling’s hairline fractures
as though they were maps
(anywhere, but here)
speed bump city
crawling with untarred roads
leading nowhere, anyway.
hopelessness fills the spaces in between
alleys fermenting in their own neglect,
and cemeteries meet parks, overlapping
seeded with broken glass
where children once rehearsed futures.
junkie-slop spray-painted bridges
slump,
over lifeless, macroplastic
polluted rivers
which carry industrial excrement
bubbling, past jetty beams
surrendering to rot.
The city decomposes all around me,
above me, below my feet and yet
Worst of all,
death lives within me.
A cigarette hangs from my mouth
its ember a minor sunrise.
small things are big in a world of defeat...
my mind dances
with every deep inhalation,
as sparks perform their brief ballet
then vanish as if rehearsed.
Sirens stitch the distance.
Dogs growl at the invisible danger
lurking at every corner in this town.
Bins rattle like an embodiment of the anxious conscience.
Somewhere, an ambulance [tragically]
edits and prolongs a life.
Disharmony harbors inside these walls
all the same,
acting as conductor to the choir of braintot vices and the ever persistent
peace disruptor clock
(they never stop)
tick,
tock
tick,
tock...
small metronomes
with a destructive appetite.
My mindmaps catalogue the abandoned districts
of my own interior:
bridges never crossed,
letters unsent,
texts ghosted,
ambitions weathered down
to bottom of the can, faded graffiti.
Desire does not announce itself
with trumpets.
It arrives like municipal decay -
quiet,
inevitable,
functional.
inconveniently,
the ceiling does not answer.
the night does not intervene.
the city continues its indifferent pulse.
There are roads one repairs.
There are roads one avoids.
and there are roads
that circle back
around the neck, and back
to the body.
in an overflowing ashtray
i extinguish the cigarette.
the dancing is done.
and the all consuming room waits,
closing in.
Hmm.
I should **********
Feb 17
Feb 17, 2026 at 1:08 AM UTC