At night, when the city sleeps, 

when the world is blind to the moontide’s refrain, 

I search the unsunned recesses with blackened hands, 

running my fingers over rounded-off edges, 

in a dark contemplation of dust. 

Here are the iridescent wings 

of broken angels, embers of stars in the mirror’s tain, 

the empty plinths & toppled bronzes of our forefathers, 

and here are the city’s trophies of empire, 

its fettered ghosts, its slow rust. 

Those who fought hard for us, 

fell outside these city walls, lost on bloodied plains, 

hear their midnight cry, sense their wraith-like presence 

at the gate, calling out for us all by name, 

our past a wound, oozing pus.

Shadow cricked its neck, the gas popping in desiccated bone; 

it waded through the Metropolis under a jellied-eel sky, alone, 

alone in the suffracaging warehouse of a ghost-grey mind. 

This was Scumday—raining knives; 

it felt a hunger descend, stormbent as a Lethean cat, 

blazing through screaming lanes. 

Shadow crept in unseen between the clearing, 

its reflection a drainbow haze in the oilslick pond, 

the daysick sun malaising behind cloud molasses. 

A rabid dog—came zoning in with kohl-black eyes, 

all pelting skin, a craze of smoking ashes— 

its unlocked jaws could swallow up the world. 

But Shadow stood still—a pillar of dead crows 

atomised to a vanishing point in mid-flight, 

slaking death with the liquid grin of a cool hand. 

A shallow form skulking at the bottom of the pool; 

a mass of tangled hair halfway down the plughole; 

a sound as living thing whose echo is its ghost.