My god I miss the city
That vast emptiness of people
This edge life so gritty
This high-rise utopia
Despair and decay
Where everyone’s clawing
Just to get through the day
My god man I miss it
That cut on the breeze
The sharpness of air
In your lungs
Through your teeth
I’m saying I miss it
It seems to speak back
Not lonely assurance
But the certainty that
Somewhere else in this city
Someone else going wrong
Be it lost, drunk, or bleeding
Pain is always around
And it's fucked up to say it
But it reassures how
Somewhere else in this city
Someone's always knocked down
It's the grooves in serrated
Tween each high-rise and ridge
Someone else breaths abated
Someone's begging for bits
And it speaks to me backwards
Through its carcigen air
There's no welcome, no silence
But I know that it's there
It's a breath in the darkness
Right before you look back
It's that sudden hereafter
Life will have me
No caps
But the upside to this
Is there's life to be had
It's electric
It's visceral
Cos the knife’s in your hand
Where you’re gritting your teeth
And you’re riding it out
Where the whine in your head
You can ride or be dead
Where the blood in your stream
Flows uphill
Flows down south
Where the taste on the tip of your tongue is all copper
Where the thrill of the ride is that we survive we suffer
They're made of different stuff
To bear this mad Arena
All of these grey faces
The wailing when I sleep
I hear them and I taste them
On the tongue and in the teeth
My god I miss the city
I cannot tell you how
How much I miss the feeling
Of reflection in the dark
Between the sheets of rain
Cast by the lamplit streets
We are all the same
Our grief is in the heat
It’s steaming off the pavement
That gentle stench of rain
The bull that is careering
Down each downtrodden path
Turns its nostrils flaring
Eyes red lit in the dark
And now it’s heading for me
It's pace is in the sentence
The quickening
The darkness
A guarantee
Repentance
I’m screaming out to this time
I’m howling in my madness
My laughter stains my eyelids
With the smear of tears that I’ve shed
And I know that in the limelight
I will always fear what I’ve said
Here they are my undead
They’re storming out towards me
And then the car lights cut through
Laughing
I’m wide awake
The city too
You’ll never be alone in pain
In a city that was built for it
Photo: Pixabay (2016)
Poet Bio
Home?
'The City'.
What is home to you?
I always dream that home will be some far green corner, but when walking, it is always the buildings I look at, never the trees.
"Poetry has always been a communion with myself, somewhere to work through the things that troubled me. It materialised out of a difficult patch in school, but I've always been a storyteller, I still remember a story I wrote when I was little about skyscrapers, they were crying because they all must stand alone. Adding that kind of depth to the world around you needs some mode of realisation, alleviation – that’s poetry." - Thalia Witherford