The City

By Hayden Brough, Grade 11

A foul, festering cancer on the face of creation
Though salved by night, rife with diseased humanity,
Rots in the blackness.
In day,
The throbbings of city, each
striving for indentity,
In night are muffled and die.
And the grimy building's heights
become the sky
While electric glare obscures
the stars.

I walk alone in a labyrinth
of gloating spires.
At every step,
The sound
Caroms carelessly down the cold
concrete corridors
Echoing loneliness and despair.
And I move in darkness,
Groping, fumbling, ever in motion,
But lost.

The night-jazz flows from
hollowly laughing doorways,
Caressing, sensual measures from
the soul;
But distorted
By the hard, withered heads of drums
Which strain to express,
But somehow cannot.

Tragic shapes hunch grotesquely
Beneath sporadic flashes
Of ancient neon tubes;
And clutch at wretched life
After hopes and dreams have
decayed
To dust,
Washed into the gutter by rain.

The fragments of vessels grate
beneath my heel
Vessels which once contained
The treachorous solace of seared
souls.
And men groan and curse as I
pass,
pouring out their anguish
From dark doorways and damp
alleys
Strewn with the refuse of inconsequential aspiration,
Crushed by time and circumstance.
At dawn,
Heaven's embers die,
And leave an ashen pall
As if sparing the eye of God
The wretchedness of man.
Sky and earth are joined,
Laced by the suppliant branches
Of barren trees,
And there is no horizon.

The never-ending black ribbon
Edged in frigid crystal
Stretches on,
And pulses with urgency.
Leading where?
capsules of people
Whine along;
And I follow,
Beneath the dingy sky
The ice spray from the wheels of
cars
Coats my corduroys.