The Noise Here is Too Quiet

The city speaks in static not loud, not soft, just indifferent. It hums beneath the sky's neon bruise, where overpasses arc like broken spines above rivers of unmoving faces. I wait for nothing at the pedestrian bend a chipped corner where the dust gathers like the memory of a voice I haven't heard since home. The gum-stained cement remembers me. The railings dull with a thousand greasy hands do not. Trees here wear ash instead of green. They do not rustle, only sigh when jeepneys groan past with their lungs of diesel and plastic saints. I sit in the cubicle I do not own, trace the fake leaf of a plastic plant, watch the blinds half shut, half giving in flutter like someone trying not to cry. And no one sees me. And that is the loudest thing of all