Shadows in the city

It is night. Lit by orange streetlights
standing in a never-ending serpentine queue.
Everything looks askew.
The moon seems pointless and vague.
There are no stars out,
the city has blotted them all out.
The city has erected ugly structures,
of cement and mortar and sand.
Forged in iron and a modern glass,
it has let its history pass.
Now all that remains is forgotten poetry
in the decrepit walls of lost lanes from a lost time.

I search for my youth in these lost walls.
I sit at home pointlessly, for hours at an end.
The television and I, both try to pretend
that we are indeed having a good time.
A nice easy day at home
relaxing after a week of hard labor in a corporate office.
I do have my friends and we drink our whiskey fine.
And we all pretend that there is happiness at the end of the line.


Weeks stretch and weary months go on.
I have been living my piecemeal life without complaints.
But slowly it is all shrinking and coming down to a dot.
A dot, a dot… a dot which the city will blot.
Till nothing else remains except for the time slotted
by the swipe-card on the corporate register.
The only log of the passage of time
as we change our clothes and move through it.

7:26 PM
4th July, 09