This is my second poem submitted for Mara Eastern’s Rehab Project http://maraeastern.com/2015/04/20/poetry-101-rehab-day/ It takes the theme of day and tries to apply it to the modern city.

I am aware that I need to work on the sometimes erratic length of my lines and would welcome any feedback on this or anything else.

This poem is very much work in progress. It is fed in part by a recent interest of mine in addressing urban issues and portraying urban landscapes in a discourse couched in and shaped by sharply divergent perspectives. No one city is depicted here. The aim is rather to attempt to produce a cubist-style amalgam of the various first- and third-world cities I have lived in over the past 50 years and to discourse on the particularities, similarities and differences that unite, divide and distinguish them.

 

Daylight Hours

Day begins with the deserted streets a sea

Of discarded kebab-wrappers

Blown by gentle wind

Through pools of puke

Deposited outside pubs.

*

Huddled figures finish late-shifts

Or are off to an early start.

Papers replete with right-wing propaganda

Pile up outside newsagents and are bought up by curious workers along the way.

And street-sweepers with

Their water jets and whirring machines

Appear in the crisp light of a sun

Peeking and winking at them

Round the corners and in the windows

Of a low-rise landscape of benign limestone buildings

That is home.

*

The veins of the city clog

With vehicles

In treacly slow-moving lines

Car-parks and pavements fill

Shops and schools open their doors with a yawn

Traffic-police and caretakers do their job

*

Food trucks line up

And the already obese

Queue for lunch-time treats

Punctuating work

Under a sweltering mid-day sun.

Sweat their way back to work.

*

The afternoon,

Since siestas became unacceptable,

Is a long sinking feeling

Declining towards evening,

Buoyed by spoonfuls of sugar in coffee cups

As birds chirp and congregate to roost

And the petals of flowers close up shop for the night.

Bats wheel around in the dusk

Swooping down to pick up discarded fruit.

The litter pickers with their children’s unwashed unshod

Feet dangling from the back of a cart do their rounds.

Dad’s wiry muscles sternly humping rubbish up onto the flat bed

Of a truck. Mom up the duff again. Kids messing around.

Shouting.

*

A slow parade of cars

Wends its way honkingly homewards

To luxury apartments, perched high in the sky,

Under a sliver of a new moon

In darkening skies.