In my city darkness rules,
broken only
by the shattered lights of a thousand lives
that are crushed unnoticed.

Tiny points of color
red and green now yellow warning
slow, don't stop, but don't commit to go.

And we take the night
for what it used to mean
and grow disappointed
in its lack of delivery.
Our poets are silent.
Our singers drunk,
their words spilling out in clumps,
and still we expect
under cover of night,
the litter of their words will be transformed
into illuminating myths of life.

And finding them to only be
scraps of paper
wasted on our history,
 
we gather them like leaves
to stuff in our shoes
and pretend as if our soles
weren't holed but new.

The doors that once provided
warmth and answers
lie on streets no longer safe,
and the taverns
where we passed our youth,
are filled with people drunk
with their desire for escape.

And tossed from raucous lit life
into day just dawning,
the silence is unbearable,
making spare moments
beneath the sun,
seem more dark
than darkness has become.

And still
I choose to live here.
 
Walking streets
more real in memory
than what they have become
shadows find me pools
I search for reflections
of what I have known
and find none.

Turning I leave
emptiness filled with a hundred bodies disconnected
and seek the small alley
that holds but distant threat of the sun,

The key that fits the lock
that turns and opens to my
sacred space
is old and worn,
and worry do I with each day
I will come home
and it will be too bent or weak
to free the lock and leave me
trapped without
in a city
where all has become closed in.
 
It is here
and only here,
do I sink to my knees
and reveal to the earth
all the life I have within me,
my fingers scrabbling
to find the words I have buried
in soil safety.

In my city darkness rules,
rich and fetid
turns the earth
to deep shade roots
till they are strong.

Tiny points of color
breaking into the night
red and green now yellow blooming
unseen in this rushing life.

small breaths disturbing
the stillness of my heart,
I sit and bear the silence,
My words
unnecessary.
The songs of scattered birds
illuminating what I would have
mistaken for gloom

and I see,
stirrings of something
so slow and beautiful,
so easy to miss,
that it seems of a story
all magic and strange mysts.

but this is life
as it has risen from the soil
time and time before that I
have stepped over and past,
rushed from brick to stone,
searching for signs in the skies
never thinking to begin with the ground.

and when life and rush
brought me to my knees,
devastation I did not greet,
but the seedling flower of hope.