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John Mudge | + Follow Poet |
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Sunrise Over Sodom

A steel sky, wan and dull, littered
	With ragged clouds and
		bitter dregs of a world girding for
	Sleep
		But no rest
by day, draws a frame over grim roofs and vapid doorways.
Indolent breezes rustle debris past shuffling feet of
	Staggering fools and
	acrid night-women, stirring tepid
		Air
	Heavy with the smells of too many
			Unbathed nights and wretched days,
Witness to a thousand acts of lonely love
	Purchased with tears money and scraps
	of ego.

Lank buildings throw shadows and hopeless glances
	Westward, patiently aware
		That neither relief nor sympathy
	Is at hand,
		Complaining
In blind suffering beneath layers of paint and lurid grime,
Defenseless against a shadow-world that gnaws and mauls
	And drains them dry of
	life: they stand in fear of
		Morn 
	Which heralds familiar scenes
			Of disrupted peace,
Ghastly bits of deathly, decrepit life
	Like giants reduced to shivering terror and
	helplessness.

Street lights, harsh against the dawn, sickly,
	Cast unholy light
		Over faceless shadow-figures gliding
	Past
		Silently
On unearthly legs, moving on but never gone, always
Reappearing in frustrating repetition of an act
	Too oft repeated
	stripped of novelty but not of
		Pain
	Laced with overtones of ghoulish
			Fascination, ashamed and unresisting,
The nagging quease of small, unseen, and vile wrongs,
	Awaiting the bright too brief relief
	of day,

Whose destitute sun waxes brighter by small degree
	Chasing shadows and shadow people
		To the farther horizon
	(Far
		But too close)
Shadow presence only masked by the quickening light of one more day
Dawning grieved and heavy over Sodom, a dread
	Eternal duty
	repeated eternally at appointed
		Hours
	Done and done again in gray shades
		Of memory, ritually pondered
In the half-lit pause between the night sounds' ceasing
	And the roaring halcyon of yet another
	still-born day.

 This was written in the wake of a 2:00 AM tour of Times Square in 1977. Could be any decayed urban area. I have seen many.

Copyright © John Mudge | Year Posted 2015

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