Feb 7
The City Never Sleeps
By 2 a.m., skyscrapers stand buck-naked
Laughing in mad sepia staccato.
We buried our fathers’ ashes here,
Now they rise against the night
Growing taller each day –
The city never sleeps, they say.
By 3 a.m., a million squares go out, only the ones with
the mad, the sad, the naked and the dead
Blink like dead-drunk fireflies –
Gee, says a merry tramp in moonlight
The mad, the sad, the naked and the dead
Are all alike –
By 5, the sky turns amorous mauve
Street kids with hair as yellow as shit
Cradled to sleep to cuss-serenades –
Frolic like lurid confetti in a wasteland
Pulling out strawberry condoms for fun
Remember, says the merry tramp at dawn
The mad, the sad, the naked and the dead
Are all alike –
The city never dies for a moment, they say
Only you do.
By 6 , the sun peeks into graveyards –
Startling estranged lovers awake
Pecking the bosomy housewife on lips,
Frying omelette-aubades for breakfast
By 8, everyone leaves –
To work, to markets, to other cities –
Leaving cool-blue tombstones muttering
Leaving itr[1]on bedsheets, steam in the shower, stains in the kitchen and bodies in the past –
The city never dies, they say –
Only you do.
By 8, few return –
Plucking the moon like a golf-ball,
Squeezing its flesh into whiskey-bubbles
Remember, says the merry tramp at nine,
The mad, the sad, the naked and the dead
Are all alike.
Froth in knife-thin glasses rise –
Pulp-posters on mottled brick-walls rise
The traffic, the yellow street-children rise
Neon-signs, parrot-green prostitutes rise –
Office-cubicles, ghosts, dust, skyscrapers rise
Mud-jargons, brittle-boned city-slickers rise
Only our shadows shorten each day.
Originally published in: The City Never Sleeps | Café Dissensus (cafedissensus.com)
