gargoyle

Here I sit :
cross-legged on a catwalk,
wreathed in the acrid smoke of a cigarette,
adding its stench to the smog that penetrates the air.

The city oozes its existence in stingy trickles,
drops clotting even as they form.
I should walk barefoot on the splinters,
on streets where broken corpses of past lives
circle like candy wrappers caught in a drain.

Here is no mourning for a child unborn --
let it hang like a bat in the dead dark sky,
a chrysalis crushed under stone,
a firefly drowned in a sty.
No pity --
No prayer --
just a burst of laughter in empty eyes,
        tight skin in cramped spaces,
     and studied smiles on plastic faces.
 
In the stinking air, the backlash flies
from a final, sullen slap of grief -
ricochets as an empty howl escaping into night,
footsteps echoing down an alley, out of sight.

Isn't it funny how oblivion can't weep ?
 
I reach the end of the cigarette,
and flick off the ashes over the city of the dead.

Still I sit :
nothing --
just the remnant of a lie,
a name and a number on a missing persons file,
tethered on the edge of a one-way street
where the damned and the lost
(in the name of the father...)
mark the grave of a kitten I threw in the gutter.