How brave is it to break
And yet have no cracks to show for it.

The streets touched me,
Like the tip of an iceberg,
And the buildings;asleep under the grey blanket,
Watched from vacant eyes of the window,
As I stood, under the shadow of a flinching streetlight,
An illuminated effigy;
Trying to solve the puzzle,
The secret chess,
Of my sacred life.

I could see rooftop antennas amongst the stars,
Reaching for invisible light,
And I could hear the city rats crawl,
Across the blank spaces of a blinding night,
And for a brief moment I became one with them;
The crawling stars,
Lurking in the garbage of the endless infinite,
Till vertigo wheeled me home,
On the flat footpath,
On the crowded cobblestone.

I have been here before,
At this traffic stop turned always red,
It taught me the parable of permanence;
How easy it is to forget,
That which remains forever
And unchanging, like a lullaby.
Thus, many with dreams have halted here;
Watched the buildings grow taller,
Felt themselves go smaller,
Like a used eraser,
Or a shadow past nine o’clock, 
Till all that remained were the rubber shoes on a torn tarmac,
And the cinnamon smell of burnt desire.

Perhaps, if I close my eyes,
I can imagine myself close to home.

At midnight the huts hum,
Songs from the seventies,
And lacklustre dreams clog,
Empty arteries 
With human fog.
I call it the Diffused Condition;
When the dye of the world,
Stains a man’s eye,
And social cataract is sold as gold.

Come morning I would be one of the footsteps out in this ocean,
Grappling against exhaust smoke,
And customary anonymity.
My pristine message, then parched,
Will poke my gullet.
And I would look with longing,
At the overflowing gutter for answers,
And drink deep 
Of the failings and the fantasies,
Till I choke on the simplest of needs,
And smallest of mercies;
Like a fish finding home,
In the oil of the frying pan.

How perfect it is to preach the plausible,
And portray it as prophecy.