Author S. K. Nicholas

The city stinks like a beer shit; one of those you squeeze out after a night of heavy drinking. It floats within my brain like signs of the stigmata or the image of a brunette reclining on a sun lounger that’s slowly slipping into the mouth of a sinkhole. The city is a stranger or one of those lovers that’s waiting for something better to come along instead of what you’ve got to offer. Familiar yet distant. Comforting but absent, like a father in love with the bottle, or a mother in love with her vanity mirror and the potions at her disposal she wishes would keep her from growing old. The bus goes to the end of the line, and at the end of the line is a body floating in a lake of peppermint oil and seaweed the colour of your sister’s eyes. On the back of a milk carton, another ghost calls to you from across the great divide. Afraid of letting go, and scared of getting too close, the streets dissolve like painkillers in paper cups. They fizz like stomach acid that heaves up a cancerous oesophagus to rot the teeth of a priest. Lighting a cigarette, strands of dyed hair fall from the sky like dead angels, or those leaves they call helicopters we used to catch as children. Twisting this way and that, they now avoid my grasp as I kick the ground and skip from kerb to kerb in search of a poem to crush the skulls of all those that pass me by. The hours are strange, much like the kids that hang outside corner shops in the hope of being noticed, or those that prowl the night in gangs because there’s no one to love them back home. Angry at life, they destroy what they can, because destruction is what we do best. To others and ourselves, we crush the innocent, and mutilate all signs of weakness. The city is an open wound, but sometimes it’s a kiss. With sugar on her lips as a taxi driver gets his brains blown out at a set of traffic lights, steam rises from the sewers and sucks itself into our dirty mouths and tired lungs. Junkies beneath the underpass, and whores beneath the sheets. Under the rooftops the dead wait to die, and within shells of brick and flesh and bone, we throb and pulsate and chew our tails waiting for a moments release before being submerged once more.