The Streets Make This Sound

The streets make this sound as they go by, they whisper curses in tongues of smoke so that, though spoken softly, the warm breath of night rings loud enough between our silences. These pockmarked volcanic statues are adrift on a soot-blackened sea, let splashed salt and ash fill these holes: they’ll keep our heads above water. But for how long – to go unasked so many times is not just carelessness and disregard of opportunity, it’s deliberate fear of our reflected faces in the spilled glass and stilled oceans underfoot. You must hear the talking shadows watching without eyes, breathing in without mouths, feel the growing chill as I do. They wait and feed and grow louder in the vacuum. Eventually, what will be left is our universal bodies and disgust at the nucleus of every dying sun. We will be torn apart. Take a shuddering, hesitant breath but once and hold the first dying leaf – still green – to your lungs. Twice someone has tried to crack this open and free the toxicity everyone has slowly built resistance to, but every cough sounds like a choked confession, every time vomit is tasted it’s swallowed so that the hypochondriac doesn’t panic. Picked scabs reopen scars, but I want you to be hurt because I feel like I need to be the one to bandage your wounds, unwrap them to expose bloody sketches in a similar vein on myself so that hopefully we can watch them both one day fade – beauty is fleeting. Nothing is ever completely forgotten, but seen once is enough. Do we need to always remember the dreams we shared before we wake up?

Smoke in the distance

Flares once but when you’re turning

You see nothing there.