Sunrise Over Sodom

A steel sky, wan and dull, littered With ragged clouds and bitter dregs of a world girding for Sleep But no rest by day, draws a frame over grim roofs and vapid doorways. Indolent breezes rustle debris past shuffling feet of Staggering fools and acrid night-women, stirring tepid Air Heavy with the smells of too many Unbathed nights and wretched days, Witness to a thousand acts of lonely love Purchased with tears money and scraps of ego. Lank buildings throw shadows and hopeless glances Westward, patiently aware That neither relief nor sympathy Is at hand, Complaining In blind suffering beneath layers of paint and lurid grime, Defenseless against a shadow-world that gnaws and mauls And drains them dry of life: they stand in fear of Morn Which heralds familiar scenes Of disrupted peace, Ghastly bits of deathly, decrepit life Like giants reduced to shivering terror and helplessness. Street lights, harsh against the dawn, sickly, Cast unholy light Over faceless shadow-figures gliding Past Silently On unearthly legs, moving on but never gone, always Reappearing in frustrating repetition of an act Too oft repeated stripped of novelty but not of Pain Laced with overtones of ghoulish Fascination, ashamed and unresisting, The nagging quease of small, unseen, and vile wrongs, Awaiting the bright too brief relief of day, Whose destitute sun waxes brighter by small degree Chasing shadows and shadow people To the farther horizon (Far But too close) Shadow presence only masked by the quickening light of one more day Dawning grieved and heavy over Sodom, a dread Eternal duty repeated eternally at appointed Hours Done and done again in gray shades Of memory, ritually pondered In the half-lit pause between the night sounds' ceasing And the roaring halcyon of yet another still-born day. This was written in the wake of a 2:00 AM tour of Times Square in 1977. Could be any decayed urban area. I have seen many.