I came across this old poem I wrote a few years ago. It describes the grey, hostile side of the city, viewed from a park bench (without a bottle of cheap cider, which would have been a perfect accompaniment given the mood of the poem). I was very much playing around with the structure/ form of the lines and I am not sure it works here, but anyway:
The city.
My hands. A bursting grapefruit full of acid juice.
A half-smoked cigarette smoulders in the gutter,
rolling to and fro with the breeze in a restless dance.
Ash bleeds into the drain.
An old man cycles past on a battered bike,
wisps of silver hair
whisper his secrets to the world from his pink head.
Ten kilos of wet sand sit in hessian sacks,
slumped at the foot of a nearby silver birch tree.
Red flowers of passionate velvet create hints of sex in this grey cityscape.
Conkers lie scattered on the grass and gravel,
smashed underfoot to a bruise coloured mush.
The smattered brown skins bear broken pearls of brown and black.
Fleshy, spiked green shells are but a distant memory,
no longer a muse.
A blue-eyed child runs wide into the embrace of the wind,
mittens flying beside him,
desperate to keep up the pace.
A smug roly-poly sausage dog raises his hind leg and
trickles confirmation of his existence onto some conker mess,
making a pungent muddy soup.
Leaves paper the poop scoop bin
with their fragile veins
and deep decorative shades
of red, orange, yellow and brown.
A filthy pigeon flutters from his lampost perch to the bin below.
He stops, jutting his head from side to side,
then sweeps away into the sky,
a little dot dunked in a vat of the city's shit.
This is the city.
Beautiful in its naked ruin.
Ferocious in its pace,
fragile and lingering in its traces.
I watch in the wake of its life.
A quiet tide sweeps over the roads like a tired, maternal broom.
The debris of another city day washes over the grey tarmac
and trickles
down the cracks
in
the
pavements.
This is the city.
