The Tower Block

The elevator shudders - then a muted ping as narrow doors slide open, the conveyance only lifts one person at a time, when it descends it is always empty. I've been here before, the stairs are always urine stained condoms lay like squashed snails on the cracked concrete. It is a place for secretive degradations a covert whereabouts where shame wears thin its painted grin. Nobody climbs this stairwell it winds and ascends - a hollow intestine wrapped around an echoing tower. I'm on the wrong floor, a small sign on the bare grey wall reads, "wrong floor." I recall too late that there is no 'right' floor just living-spaces cut into damp breeze blocks Stagnant light pools in neon-lit halls, and the still air hums with a low electric buzz. Key in hand I search for an address that is a denominator of my personal blood type. We came here as refugees gladly, the city had grown remorselessly alien but now we are exiled, lost in this space that rises upward beyond any high of hope, it reaches into a darkness, a murk we suspect is a buried basement and not a rise at all. Far, far below, on the other side of a smeared, tightly-shut window shadow people hide from themselves where as usual a ‘seek and find’ rages on. There at ground floor level the elevator doors do not open, not for anyone. The people of the tower are most grateful to be sequestered inside their own hollowed-out hive free from the streets and the always perilous threat of their own collective dreams.