Empathy

I washed three times but still:
I smell the vile breath, and still
I see the sunken bloodshot eyes
a pain too deep and miserable to scream
from its open grave, vestige of human lies.

Tomorrow your vacant eyes will not remember this face
yet the fetid smell will not ever leave my head.
Again and again it plays,
the blurry vision of a heat induced hallucination
sneaking up, once again, to threaten my sanity.

I thought it was a child,
an innocent, ill-fated child on a bike,
perhaps still burning, perhaps still alive.
Yet all I could find was the shell of a human life
bruised by a world which is infinitely unkind.

As you blinked at me and slurred your dissent
I disentangled your legs from the wheels
tugged you out of your certain crematorium
dead weight to weak arms and shaky knees,
dead weight to all our cushioned lives.

My abandoned car blinked furiously
ignored by the lives that unblinkingly drove by
No longer human, no longer of use,

illegal smelly immigrant

I wretched violently on the way home
the smell of your skin on my clothes and hands
the unsettling disgust in humanity
steeped into my disillusioned plans.
Only one man stopped:

‘anche io sono straniero ma…’

His conscience dirtied by judgement over judgement
your rotten breath etched deep into his identity
an anchor of blame which has nowhere tangible to go
defensive and defenceless to this worldwide generalisation.
Anche io sono straniero ma.

Did I really save your life, did I choose to be this way?
To follow the trail in the grass
where the cheap boxed wine pulls drunkards off course.
To acted upon automation, like the Belding’s ground squirrel,
putting itself in danger in the name of evolution.

You asked god to bless me but did I really do you a kindness?
Or should I have let the heat put you to sleep, cease your pain?
Head nuzzled in the prickly grass, feet tangled in your rusty bike
barbed wire inches from your eye
invisible to the road, invisible to the world.

And as xenophobia prevails, as hatred and fear win the UK
and all these cars speed away, I feel lonely and wired incorrectly.

---

 

Featured: Pink Man / Leviathan (Blu), to be found on  Oberbaum Brücke / Falckensteinstraße ( U Kottbusser Tor stop).

Choke.

I can smell the lethargy in the air as the rain comes down.
Who told you you could write all over my skin?

Territorial disputes.

Casually manhandling death and the rain
don’t stop, the rain           don’t stop.
Biting breasts under neon colours.
Stuffing your face and drowning in the barrel-
Drowning in the rain of your pain.

Contempt for conformity. Body builders of human agony.
The vivid dreams stopped months ago.
Flashes of blood running down my neck.

This winding road is damned and this skin is too tight.
Grinning mouths with men hanging at the corners.
Unsteady flooring and gums aching.

I’m heady from the drinks, the want and the sweat.
This tube smells of metal, blood and piss.
There’s a nightmare pulsing in between my legs.
Laughing hyenas pull at my clothes.           I give in.

Vaccinate me for control.

Chapped lips in the cold. Stomach acid scratches at my soul.
Flashing streetlights, cars, dancing on my window.
Magnetic network of obligations and purpose.

Buzzing in the world and screeching in my ears.
Monotone high pitched frequencies and I’m going mad, I’m going       mad.

The itch, the itch the pulse           in the eye,

the everlasting night, the bite,

the blood.

I’m a mess of filaments,

my nerves are barbwire.

Your fingers feel like bombs.

Psychosis, migraines, want.           A hollowed out gut.

Out of body,

overlooking this city.

You stand next to me, naked and shivering.
My cigarette shakes at the lips.

It falls and I          let          myself                               fall.