Untitled (Currently)

Roaming the streets derelict and dreamless

Past narrow back alleys exacerbated by memories of secret rendezvous

Hours that dashed past idling stalls and spazashops

Luxuriating in sweet longing for disappointments

Guilt-ridden comforts and mistakes plotted

Suddenly frequent my sleep with charming disquiet

And I awake with a shudder at simple essences of decay about me

Meandering these drunken streets burning with chills of obituaries

Slumberous walks of a distraught mind at bridges to erasure

Entrusting his heart to gossip and other curiosities

Conclusions prolonged with psalms of a wondrous life upended

Here his story is a parody unconsoled by drink and scented smoke

Rags he scrutinises inside wait on shoulders of his monsters

Seizing all torment and suppressing its surge from gurgling into drains

From whence the ghetto sniffs itself throughout heat blizzards 

Ransacking its treasures of boredom and tedious leisure

With such glimpses into reprimanded futures

Caged with other birds and dissipating lives

Lacerating a heart weighed by worrisome indulgences with rescues

Of my kin known for intolerable ignorance and spite

In him each death mourned during evenings’ agonies

Flickers disconsolately like a faded film overlooking pasts possibilities

And the ambient tale of sorrow writes yet another chapter to be sung 

Aghast with castigation by other forlorn sons and daughters ruined by emptiness

And could this be fate’s dealing a tolerable hand unclenched

To gamblers with souls as cards to barter for vouchers and life expectancies

Amidst animal vanity and proud displays of wounds as tokens

At this final hymn of strange-less days welcoming wayward guests knocking when tears abate

Could these unhinged heads be laughing in chorale to their ghost-face

Reciting thrills to soothe vanished spies who died with old middays

And could this walk be final and borne safely to the rim of oblivion

Without chronicling my disdain for shuttering searches for a respite?

Will we once witness a storm of butterflies inhabiting most our reveries

In unison with our peers soured by age and diseases of mad-towns

Out here at the outskirts of mercy and fortune for the unjust

Where many have inspired ghosts to labour on their behalf?

Perchance not

For the rifles are dealt to the brave to slaughter those closest to heart first

Out here, where swamps of rage boil with heartbeats of young provocateurs

Who face bleak nights jostling with frayed and tempered angels – and rage