City

Cities provide many ways to suffer. The bitterly cold, the sweltering heat, brutality, insensitivity, anonymity. I dream of sooty bricks, oily puddles, of buses that smell like garbage trucks, sores and scabs, rashes, bug bites. Noises wake me up and it’s still dark. I hear cockroaches scurrying and screaming from someone else’s nightmare. Sometimes I dream of gardens, meadows. I have pansies growing at my window, and I am visited by verses like goldfinches. Many have it worse than I have. They are the elderly with broken bones, the sick, the mentally ill, unstable, addicts without fixes, the hungry, women of the streets, the lonely, children who sleep under bridges. I hear sirens and the roar of engines. People have died everywhere here, and we are living in their mausoleums.