i.
Even the roads are sickly. Tilt the city sideways step up from mountain rockface to mirrored facade. Roads stripped from the earth and thrashing against the globed sky, bent over shrinking heads and plummeting. The city folding on itself. Rub shoulders with rabble, gloved fists swinging steady and rhythmic, flesh pendulum. Shattered windows and metatarsals, plaster casts and glyptic scribbles.
ii.
The machines cutting pavement the sidewalks roped off the streetlights broken flashing on the second on the dot on the second. Even the roads are sickly. Calligraphy in tiretracks, left turn riddles. Quincunx intersections, read meaning in manhole cover placements. A city of tunnels, twisted and proud.
iii.
And running on fumes, mathematically exact. Five minutes between busses, the tick of the clock. The click of the streetlights shifting RED GREEN YELLOW, walking man countdowns, hands severed and grasping, held towards you in streets. Alarms set and repeating. Between jackets on corners, see shoes in hubcaps, circular spinning, this city chromatic. A city of dots, motes of light.
iv.
We tire night driving. We separate and walled and the city stretches and yawns, its lights striped, stippling black with patterns almost legible—hey, try to see home. Horizon flushed—let’s make this a moment to remember. And suffused, light fills alleys and corners, and home is somewhere there, where the city and our bodies overlapping, always cool to the touch, always standing against us.