Beasts In The City

Cats are picking their way along.  Heart-eyed dogs strive to chase but are restrained.  All the birds round here have been immortalised in graffiti.  He is sitting at his desk in the window and the sun is coming in through the glass.  Ticking time is biting at him.  The coffee machines are on strike.  Everyone’s out, trying to grind out change.  All the rabid atoms agitate.  The rain steams in to pound down on the hot hard streets and the beasts rush to cower under covers.  And crush.  The news is unreliable.  The sums are made up out of new numbers no one knows how to count.  He makes friends slowly, but always gets there eventually.  They keep building bigger and bigger buildings.  He is stuck at that desk with the sunshine sloshing in, stuck at what to put next.  Beasts are on the ground and up in the buildings and around in the air.  Retreating or emerging or jostled, caught between the two.  He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.  It gets crepuscular, lurid, the colours all coming out of lightbulbs now.  The beasts sniff and saunter through the streets.  Text buzzes around, making jagged cut out shapes.  There are lapses in concentration, things smashed apart.  They swim out of focus, back into focus, out of focus again.  He is glad no one is watching, it gives him a freedom to do what he wants.  To make whatever sense of it he can.  Heart-eyed moths burn themselves up.  Spiders pick their way along.  Every individual fox round here has been immortalised in graffiti.