Two Stories
Spume Law
Whole street's screaming drunk for the duration of the weekend. Taking it in turns to vomit outside the pub. Kids smash empties on the road.
There is an air of abandon here.
Across the tracks the trash spills like lava down the embankment. The train rumbles by and hardly anyone glances out the carriage. They can't beat it past their own reflections. God you look so fucking good. Hot.
All the boarded up houses are burning. They no longer send out demolition crews, the youth'll do it for free. To keep warm. Kicked out the house along with the dogs. They don't give a fuck what you do, where you go.
Across the rooftops, echoing along the avenues rival foot ball songs ingrained into baptised flesh. Gets the blood up, sours a mood. Bottles will break tonight. Blades with flash tonight.
They'll be pavement blooms all across this town tomorrow. God, you look so good.
Last night a storm moved around the city
We turned out the lights
Watched it strike out against us
With brilliant jolts, power hungry
Flashing and rumbling
Like a living thing that you feel in your veins.
FugAZi
the heat clamps slippery vice flushing neck, swollen belly watching you watching telly a curtain cloud draws across the growing shadow and the sun slips somewhere else tomorrow and the ribbons of flashing flickering lights draw tighter around the city, squeezing--inserting more pressure, constricting the choking hacking cough of a society in catharsis, a city stuttering with the brevity of an epileptic.
Such a night as this would be cooler in the graveyard listening to the raucous holler of jaykeys hidden in bushes or crawling through the rusting bars to fall into whiskey dreams above the mouldering bones of long gone aristocratic merchants, fitful slumbering with rats and demons clinging to the extremities of the subconscious ripped up mind. Sleep man, sleep.
Old ghosts.
The graveyard, I can picture it; solid straight-backed shadow slabs, silent not a sound, not even a breeze, grey grass beneath the feet and the swell of the city ocean all around that bone filled hump of death, the graveyard hill in the sea of life.
In the cave we shivered all summer, our windows chipped and broken. We look across the deserted school yard at the lights of other stoic tenements soft golden wide rooms nineteenth century before the ghettos, and now, apparently, after.
Every day we follow roads that sparkle with fractured diamonds.
Dave Migman is a UK writer and artist whose work has appeared in various poetry 'zines including Pulsar, Inclement, Rialto and Polluto. He maintains a small presence online. A book entitled The Wolf Stepped Out is scheduled for release in the distant future (Doghorn Publishing). For more information, see: davemigman.daportfolio.com or crackedslab.blogspot.com.