Poem: Nightfall

Nightfall

Autumn creeps into my room,

blows its breath against my body

and I fall into my bed like leaves.

I drift into a delicate dream

under waves of silky sheets,

as cars sail across asphalt seas.

Shade-sipping cicadas sizzle

until the sinking sun signals

the sky to turn black and blue.

The moon bruises the broken streets

with a bone-white hue. Nightlights ignite

fluorescent fantasies and smokescreens.

I can’t sleep. My city keeps coughing cacophony;

choking on smog, it curses the stars for sitting snug

in their solitary silence. The city-slickers are senseless;

some seek to be saved, while others singe their spirits

with suicidal shots of liquor. The slow burning liquid licks

the lungs to drown out the dissolute dogmas of day.

In darkness, the bitches and dogs come out to play.

And dogs bury sticks and bones between hips for moans

but a bitch’s dirty words will make a dog come clean.

Junkies can’t flee their freeloading fleas—so they claw

across concrete, and scratch up enough change

to float around with their monkeys on a leash;

Addicted to the scent of this citrus-tinted city

the commoners are too cold to sip vitamin c;

the spin of this cyclical system is sickening.

The food-deprived dumpster dive in anorexic alleys

that ache between bulimic buildings that binge

on bodies and vomit out souls onto the streets.

But the people choose the tools to skewer life.

So their ghosts gather on graves and gamble grief;

shootin’ craps and talkin’ more shit than sewer pipes.

The haunted howls and toxic tones infect the sky;

it sounds like the undying echo of genocide.

The mentally enslaved shackle their brains to a train

that lugs their load across an underground railroad;

but the train tracks are a spine of human bones

and Tubman stopped conducting a long, long time ago.

With another day to bruise and break; the heavens

peel off the band-aid of night. The murky mirage recedes.

People rise and open their eyes but still lose sight of their dreams.

But I’m too ran-down to rise and too distraught to dream.

I can’t sleep. Leaves fall and fall leaves.

I think, therefore I stand on the edge of my sanity

but my mind already jumped.

-R.Gibson