Raw Lives

Tents in doorways
and Uber-Eats.
Fallen people
walking the streets.
Boarded shop fronts,
empty for years.
The slow decline
that chews a heart down.

Eyeless and unseen,
the kings and queens
of nowhere scream.
Out into the night.

Never home, never there,
never anywhere.
Never reasoned, never neat.
Always happening
on someone else’s street.

The flash of steel
and sabre teeth.
Raw flesh, raw lives.
Random acts of violence.
Hatred begets hatred,
begets sirens, begets silence.

Never home, never there,
never anywhere.
Never reasoned, never neat.
Always happening
On someone else’s street.