THE STILLNESS OF THE MORIBUND CITY

A spark ignites in the sleeping brain
and he awakes in the uncertain night.
He thinks he hears the sound
of a far off train hurtling through the darkness,
its metallic rumble breaking through the cold air.

He can't move from the uterine warmth
of his blankets as he audits with foreboding
the fearsome augury of the train of prophesy
that seeps into the chill of the predawn.

And then the sound waves diminish
until they disappear into the abiding silence.
It is only then that he considers
the stillness of the moribund city.

He knows what it looks like
from the mouth of his cocoon,
his mind ranging over the frigid streets
feeble in their brittleness, without motion,
in the deathlike grip of entropy.
He has been there often enough
to know their essence. Residing in his mind
is always the remembrance of the hollowness,
the empty spaces, the cold death
of the city in its death spiral.