In an ill city, i am shrieking lines and letters
crustily etched into each rusting brick
and caked unwittingly in cement sent to exile;
i have looked down every alley and walked through every shadow.
I see my vignettes in the dumbfounding puddles
and the curves that stare back are rigid as bark;
fate in the lifelessness
and wet footsteps blithely tread themselves into hell.
My alley is a garden of a thousand treasures and i am the lucky one entrusted and encaged,
for each unreachable fortune promises tempestuous torturous trials.
There are devotees in my alley, and they seek solace in the trash cans:
there is nothing for them in the mainland;
they have ventured out before, only to find
the black gnarly fog blinds them and denatures their senses;
and they come back tattered in tears of laughter, but intact as if fed mercy from the storm;
leaving behind the neon pink and yellow the potholes of water disdainfully reflect.
That is the land of the outsiders,
withering down our devotees,
vandalising the soulful sincerities of our alley.
The alley welcomes them but they do not welcome it;
their vision supersedes our simple,
and our veiny arms do not uphold their imitative vanity.
There are animals in this alley, but for them, life is a fever dream:
the fog is a breathtaking sky of crown colour and the earth a fashionable mattress;
whether of feeble soil, entrenching dust, or heartful granite,
in their winceless roams they evade posing for fate;
it bodes well for them to let joy trickle into their eternal vicissitudes.
Sometimes i envy them.
The outsiders are relentless without intention,
and intention is a maid-cum-mistress that has seduced their intellect;
like a snowflake that would shatter into shreds is their heart’s volatile temperament
and they sycophantically cajole it
negotiably pull at its strings
in cycles of cruel unsatisfying harmony
clinging and diverging by the clock
one such outsider was a frolicker here in impatient flight;
the twitch in his eyebrows ticked with the ecstasy of passion;
he had a scenic vision for which he commended himself.
And strutting in a shiny stutter, of confident shame,
as if on a journey to a wistful pace;
his eyes sparkled an intriguing glee, astounding in his dire circumstance
as if the answer was got to a question racked through every brittle bone in his hunched snail figure,
his eyes bore almost a soulful reticent naivety - i could have mistaken him a devotee
but their intuitive arrogance dubbed him a wretch;
and the kinks of light exposed the premature greys in his hair, uncared for
undoubted and entangled in his mission;
his sagging shirt blotched with long-lived mustard stains, and his sleeves abnormally loosened at his hands,
wiping decades of sorrowful tears and cold sweat;
a distinct moan creaked from his splitting boots, buckling under his trudge,
but he radiated an isolated stealth, even though he knew of his surroundings; it was admirable.
The clink and the rattle welcomed him to the silent store at the corner of the alley
and the door tailed him round impeccably slow, before slamming shut with unpredictable ease.
Our fellow stranger walked out a few seconds later, erupting faster into his stride,
i sensed hostility, and his arms were full;
i heard a shout, muffled by the door swinging fiercely before sinking shut in surrender;
his vehicle was no prize, and its fading blues were shrouded in pale mundanity,
and its multitude of dents were carved in such clarity, i didn’t know what to make of it;
a sputter and a roar, and my entertainment disappeared for the night.
I did not see him soon, but i was biased to miss him
Until a month later when i heard a slick approach
down the lanes and up the boulevards, before a cautious turn into our forlorn vicinity;
a steaming black sedan that didn’t huff nor puff
exuding glamour, seemed to breathe the air.
Out of an unnoticeable click stepped out a gentleman unrecognisable,
the creases on his dress shirt stood as intertwined individuals and he embodied the crux of his own persona;
he looked up but his eyes peered down and along with them my vision too shifted;
entranced in his material madness.
He took a step, and a familiar creak, a familiar groan, a whistle of return,
under the glossy velvet enwrapping him to his heels were the same split-haired laces,
a jutting round front in a rainbow of dark shades, dotted with muddy grease
‘how telling’ i thought;
and he paraded to the same shop he betrayed in his opportunist prime.
The clink, rattle and gentle slam followed his exit and he marched into the tinted concealment of his sedan having conquered the wind:
an aura of authority.
The entire affair was over in what felt a matter of seconds, rather than the prolonged minutes
i recalled of his first visit;
and in the meditative trance came rushing a foreboding roar of smoking indignance,
a harrowing howl of a pale blue motor,
one i had heard some time ago, and it zoomed from a distance, and i felt its swerving vibrations
and with a thundering bellow i felt its imminent presence, and then a violent screech
and a crash, the sedan jerked forward in compliance;
in front of my very unnerved self, there was the stranger that had crawled so close to my conscience having spoken no words
no longer still and towering in his dominion; motionless
except the single streams of dark velvet blood that soaked the fibres of his shirt;
red stains.
To ruminate on the entire ordeal or to sigh a pathetic chuckle;
he was just another stranger in a revolving world of mirrors
with apparently all to lose and nothing to gain.
The devotees live not long enough to see
what for them is an amusing blunder of chance,
and what for my tired self was once a piteous wail
but now reeks a cold cackle which even my dementing conscience concedes;
had they survived my destitute ranking of years on end,
they too would laugh at the lethal folly of their fellows.
Oh how lucky must i be shielded from an asymptomatic snake voraciously gutting my energies?