Underground

Hung heads
Weigh vacant eyes,
Ageing corpses cobweb these ancient seats.
We are standing witness's
Vestiges set asway like the meat in a smokehouse;
The smell is sweat in the absence of smouldering hickory.
Wooden and graven with apathy
like the mottled wallpaper from the funeral home,
Waiting for something
Or someone,
that had long since passed away
Leaving a vestibule filled by paranoia and anger
seeking blame but shouldering none.
The frailty of everyone....


This Life.
It takes us underground
In glass and steel
I don't know how to feel.


Furtive gazes, often fixed
and sometimes forthright
Ceaselessly seek out the empty and unoccupied spaces,
billboards and graffiti
Whose meanings are asinine,
light fittings and air vents
That shudder with intent but nothing more somatic
the small grates chuckling with recycled tunnel air.
The film of dirt along the handrail ....
Anywhere other eyes had not yet set upon
were made their home.
Arachnids in a tool shed.
The proximity is both comforting and cancerous
a mass of torso's and tendons
Straining against momentum and unexpected movement
springing forth at the merest hint of an open door.


This Life
It takes us underground.
In glass and steel
I don't know how to feel


Unlike a plane
Nor like a car
Deeper darker, further far;
We worms within a carriage car.
Trusting in the lines on the map
That have no semblance to reality
Signifying symmetry to calm us on our way.
These parallels to purgatory
Are hard to keep at bay.
Glass and steel
Is the way that I feel
Glass and steel.
There is no mourning
in the coffins of the new day.