I know this buzzing —

a city inside me of a hundred thousand
at least,
commerce, trade in waste and fuel
and emotion,

you call it chemistry
but I know it is more.

I am the census taker
aware of its dark neighborhoods,
its dangerous wastelands on the fringes,
the empty warehouses of the port district,
long streets with sad vapor lights humming
and only the odd car passing;
the living spaces for the unknown people
inside me, with some of their dwellings dark
and others lit as they sit for hours talking
into the night, perhaps
with their heads in their hands
and little to say to each other
as hard as they try;
some buildings shabby and empty
for the most part with squatters hiding
in the devastated rooms left behind
when purpose abandoned them
to the salvagers who make do;

then in the downtown grid of the chest
there are the revelers who make chaos of order,
spilling from bar to bar, loud, happy,
some desperate and longing for contact
with an immoral gleam in a longing eye;

and now across the freeways in my arms
to the fingers
that spew energy as refugees flee
wishing they were somewhere else,
inside someone else
as this city I am is no place for them.

I am left to house
the least desirable, the flight outward
allowing me only the discomfort
of knowing who will be left behind —
the leftovers, the citizens too weak
to leave me and those who prey upon them.

I sit with my own head in my hands,
the city buzzing inside me,
a song of bees gone wild, stinging me tired
from holding this all together,
this city of monuments
and painful trials, a metropolis
behind my eyes,

failed capital
of a failing state. 

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations