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i make my progress slowly through a cloud of traffic smoke / picking up the pieces of the rainbows that you broke / the colours scattered miserably ‘cross the dirty pavement slabs / oblivious, homebound workers shouting out to hail their cabs / headlights force harsh shadows and a shrinking of their souls /
reflecting off the oil and water floating in the potholes / broken rainbow pieces crunching under aching feet / undreamt dreams forgotten through action incomplete / images engraved in concrete bringing slow decay / beneath the dirty viaduct and across the alleyway //
headlights trace their beams against the fractured warehouse walls / fog descending slowly as the urban darkness calls / downtown the neon lights blaze, glowing their silent gleams / overhead the streetlights throw their harsher sulphur beams / creatures of the night are slowly beginning to emerge / both undesirable and seductive, their lives will converge / how this ends no one can accurately predict / early hours before that unavoidable conflict / human derelicts and dissipated drunken wrecks / falling out from bars and the noisy discotheques / wearily they stagger to their lonely cardboard beds / grasping empty pockets, nursing their aching heads //
at dawn the cycle starts, it all comes round again /
life is piling pain on hurt, and piling hurt on pain / so i’ll head on westwards against the traffic on the street / avoiding contact with the human flotsam that I meet / still gathering up the rainbow pieces where each one fell / scattered in the slow chaos of this urban concrete hell //
Steve Wheeler © 13 September, 2020
This poem was first published in Urban Voices by Steve Wheeler, Wheelsong Books, 2020.
Photo from Pxhere
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