These Streets

They're imagined dark - the city streets at night A plight, in many areas a blight, for eyes a sore sight, for the vulnerable a fright, the underbelly flexes its might, grey the area between wrong and right - But they're light Lampposts lean lonely Pooling themselves only Dark windows hiding dim interiors Receding from vagabonds and financial inferiors While display cabinets trace Desire on each hopelessly hopeful face Dull, against the dark ascending, Lettering and fettering bold shapes defending Neon screams with flash and glare Locks each look, each glance, each stare Mindlessly promises boon and fare Dangles carrots to battle despair The cost not counted that comes with care The hollow betrayal of the lesser share Whilst the moodiness that enhances its glory Busily events stories echoing the horrid and the gory Black corners and doorways harbour creatures that still Thought and breath, that only responds to will Braving the patches Where the shadows unlatches Wild imagination dispatches Fears that at your sanity snatches Dancing shades in dread-inducing batches That sense from sensibility detaches Sweeping headlights of car, truck and bus Loosening the battle between dread and us Frenzying fast freaksomeness against boundary walls Heightens how the crazy across reason falls And finally movement that isn't monstrously mechanical And the fruit of the shaded not tyrannic or maniacal When the form that appears To the human eye endears Though then it would seem More likely encountering a nightmarish dream For in that shape to our eye, our humanity so familiar Is how we're most exposed to inhumanity's pillar In that veined skin, our human kin, can't wait to begin, the feasting on sin, the shark that these waters fin, what can't be made away with spin, makes us regret the situation we find ourselves in For there are those who prey on the needy and the weak And does so with a heartlessly cruel streak No empathy, no feel for any condition That does not place them in a winning position Rips from souls desperate screams Of shattered tomorrows where the putrid streams Adds to the noise The night's strident voice Engines of necessity, chariots of choice Grumbling and griming, finding their way Through what we like to think of as the opposite of day When in fact the keening, and crash-bang-boom of night's laughter Reflects only what's engendered the morning before and after And what should concern is not the blanketing night But the absence in daytime even of the light SP Oct 2015