TheFlats
Above ringing passages the wind mutters
up flights of stairs pitched in gloom,
wedged with shadows. Dust descends
where muddled feathers rot and the purple
lump of a decaying squab, beak still gawped,
serves pulsing maggots that unravel its web
of brief life.
Here, all are guttural and stiff-tongued.
The rank air threatens, stultifies,
speech stilts as words shift,
meaning decays and melts back.
They tower, loom above streets,
where the wail of sirens bode
and night coils.
Light spews across wet ways, a bovine piss
clatters against the privy of a wall,
a bawled obscenity pursues as the pack bays.
Someone coughs and bleeds. Distant shouts,
derisive as a donkey’s bray, hang like a curse
in the reek of life grown cold and fetid as old bibles
in dank cellars.
The valleys of the night are littered
with debris, ragged wads of shade,
that merge, coagulate to thicker dark,
tear comfort from each other’s arms,
tangle and forget as the night bird sings
to their flutes of subdued laughter and
tunes of lust.
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