Category: Urban Poetry

In the lounge room, hanging, was an air of bitterness and exhaustion. Long hours and unsatisfied desires pressed heavily against the workers’ hearts. A pool table with scattered billiard balls was a dusty corpse in the center of the room. Phones—only phones hummed. There were no voices.

But, it seemed, the electronic buzz was enough to pull the sleepers out of their shells. A joke, then a gesture towards the bright black monolith on the table. A faint smile. This was enough, to get them through the day. This was enough.

It was night. He stood by the traffic pole just a few steps from his apartment. The weight of the day tugged at the nerves of his shoulders rounding him. His back was an ache. He could have dragged himself inside, discarded his body onto bed and his mind into air, but instead he lingered on the sidewalk, a faint dot in a winter wasteland, a cigarette butt on the corner of a street. His lungs took in a black ice wind, holding it. His heart was the only warm and beating thing–time lied frozen. Then emerged the mist, his exhaled soul. It glimmered and disappeared, lost to the sky, and faded like stars behind streetlamps.

Cold buses running
Cold buses peopled
Cold people running
Running from cold
Cold running
People
from
Buses
Cold

—despite everything, I suppose a beautiful day
is a beautiful day.

The ol’heads on the block are playing music,
no doubt memories enshrined in notes.

There are good kids scootin’-jumpin’-runnin’
‘round mothers in nice dresses.

Even the garbage men, rough like crumbled cans,
seem to be shining
under this sun.

The problems aren’t gone,
home still hangs by a thread,
and the night waits in the corner, hungry,

but right now—
This moment of this day—

Things aren’t so bad.

I wonder if this is what it means to seize the day—except
I haven’t dared to seize it,
the day has simply reached into me;

it has pulled out the pain into the light,
and somehow
it doesn’t look so bad, there,

in the sun.