His City

I was sucked into the sickly cities innards. As I walked the mire and muck of the street it seamed to me that this place is in need of cleaning. Unfortunately, I don’t have a shovel or a broom and my sense of impeding doom is moving me along.

Every building has eyes that watch and wait and plan and instigate. Every alleyway’s a scheme of thievery, murder, and rape. It’s like I’m caught in a melee between the filth and the free but the ones on top are indiscernible. Whether they friend or enemy matters not because the vacuum of this city discriminates not against who it sucks, it’s all luck.

With a roll of the dice my feet stammer twice with the sight of vice and I have a choice: continue this voyage or leave for softer noise. I pick the former and in frenzied ferocity and charge forth, cigarette in my hand and eyes to the sky of the north.

The haze of deprived sensory overload overtakes my mind with a pulsing, hammering, jagged beat; off time. I pass by the signs that warn against my crossing. This city can’t tell me to stop; tonight there will be a killing.

Oval eyes hide behind hoodies and scatter. I hear the clatter of glass as it cracks on the truth. What’s used is useless and so are all of you because this city is dying and these are its roots.

I unhinged the jaw of death with silvery periodic teeth. The heavy-handed feeling passes through sheets of conscience, brief. With every passing moment in the heart of this hell I become saturated with a hatred that consumes all fake trips stationed in the eye of the mind of a man with a vision, a vision of Christmas with lesser delinquents.

Snow-blind with rage played up to a grand stage, a strange, deranged, hurt man courses through my veins grabbing my pain by the reins and directing back at who’re to blame. The infantry fall into lines, routed and running, but no army to save them will ever be coming. This city is dying and you are to blame. My city is dying and this is not a game.

An angel of vengeance controlling life’s tenses is tensed up, I watch him in third person and he sure looks familiar. I would say he is me but he doesn’t act the same, with every act of brutality he regains vitality and continues this crusade against addiction and vagrancy.

The street is flooded with an unholy rain as the man who once was I talks to the men and women he caused to die.

“My city is sick and I can not abide. There is too much potential hidden inside to just give up and not try, so tonight you had to die. You died for your city, for your country, for your own good. You died in your own, old, self-destroying neighborhood. This city, she spoke to me, and this is what she said. You are my son, my lover, my father, my creator, you are the life blood and the automaton of my demeanor. You are my janitor, my personal assistant. You are the cleaner of defiling dissidents. You are my razor and I need a shave, cut close to the skin if you truly believe. Cut below the skin of those who misbehave.”

And he answered the city with my actions, he absorbed me and made plans, he was the man who put the gun in my hand. Now I sit, once more myself, feeling no better than the filth I tried to help. But with all this shocking violence, a horrible, grisly scene, the city does not weep for them nor thank me for my deed. The city sits there silent, motionless, and cold.

The city doesn’t breathe, doesn’t talk, but it sings. It sings a song of sirens that screech towards this man and me. And as her glaring guardians take us both to colder pastures, I look back to the streets and wonder “Where is our master?” Now we’ve become one again, that strange man and me. But the city isn’t dying, I wish I could’ve seen. The city is already dead, I was part of the disease.