a hell of a town.

My keys jingle like shackles as I pass through the golden frame of the front doors. The constant mechanical roar of the concrete jungle pounding into my equilibrium like so many war drums. I'm conscious of every step I take, the ground is so much harder here, hard like exterior of all of the lost souls who have crawled along it toward their broken homes and picked themselves up off it so many cold mornings. Their exterior seeming hard to some, still fragile to me. The electricity hums through the pavement in an endless tide of miniature seismic waves and courses into my body, as I exhale a twisting, dancing cloud of smoke into the already polluted night air.

All around me hot steel machines barrel down the avenues, desperate to make it one extra block only to stop and wait within the grid again. Everyone here is waiting, maybe without even realizing it but still waiting, waiting for something, the tension is thick enough to cut through with the black hilted butterfly knife in my back pocket. Everyone moves in forward procession like a mechanical funeral march. No one stops to look at the sky above them, where there are no visible stars and the smog and dust gathers with the electricity as it continues to hum its lonely tune of amperage. Here and there, a tree struggles to grow and flowers wilt. Sirens blare and horns blast in constant continuum, trying to part the sea of vehicles clogging the tarmac like an audial Moses. A fruitless effort every single time. A few hundred blocks away someone dies in an ambulance from a gunshot wound and a baby is born in a hospital. Gotham takes no mercy upon it's inhabitants, of which I am now one.

On every street the buildings rise up in rows like tombstones, a constant reminder of what little time each bypassing body has left. In the center, the Empire State Building rises like a florescent yellow funeral pyre, drawing all of the sleep-deprived moths from miles away toward it's electric flame. Beneath the streets the steel coffins roar through the darkness, sweaty bodies crammed in amongst one other, each with one intention, to just go home. With so many people trying to get home, I can't help but wonder why I am leaving my cold safe little room. What is it that draws me away from all of my electronic links to the rest of the world at large? With no direction and no flashlight, I venture forth into the black sea of night air. Into the dark belly of the city that never sleeps, where the only light source is commercial, available to the hordes of craving consumers for ten thirty even fifty percent off, as the economy slowly dies like wounded flies hovering a dumpster. Tonight as I walk amongst the funeral parade, unlike the rest of the mourners, I look towards the sky.