five a.m. on a sunday morning

five a.m. on a sunday morning

Beyond the glass the City sprawls and heaves.

Although in shape it resembled the writhing
metropolis he had once called home
it had since collapsed in on itself, staggering
underneath its own weight.

Above, the skies choked with the churning turmoil of smog,
vomiting chemical detritus and spewing forth steady streams of black
until the air was nothing more than a vile cauldron
the roads like shrivelled arteries smattered with cholesterol
struggling to squeeze traffic through its strangled veins and pinched nerves.

Along the rail track slagheaps withered into festering mounds,
the retch of wild dogs drowned by the gasping screams of trains.

There were junkies and whores and cardboard boxes
the steady trickle of polluted tunnels,
listening to the snarl of an empty stomach
sleep deprived frights kicking in with lurches
and the violent clatter of a pulse.

The City shuddered through the gangways
and riddled the wending paths, it coiled
like some great undulating serpent,
spewing out faded shapes of too-hot cars
and trucks packed too-close in tight little rows
birthing flustered pedestrians,
spilt coffee, new leather, burning rubber, cigarette stubs,
sweat, sewage and formaldehyde.

In the streets below crawled things that weren’t entirely human,
skin maggot-white
scraped parchment-thin over bones visible
beneath opaque flesh. They grinned nauseating grins.
They pawed and crooned at the vacant, dribbling junkies
that propped themselves up on severed legs,
and the shrieks of a hooker getting her ass pounded
gurgled to a sudden halt.

There were more to take her place,
and the City was a whorehouse, a slaughterhouse,
a smear on the horizon, its skyline crisscrossed
with scaffolding sticky with grime, cat gut, lymph,
blood and snot and shit
and vomit.

Smoke wheedles from the chimneys
like the reedy wheeze of a cancer patient,
washing lines still slick with the slime of frost,
hanging slack across patios.
They seem to be the only things holding it all up.