Cities, This City

The things they always complain of,
coming from outside and again on leaving,
there are so many of us crowded in here,
and we are all so aloof and alone,
We, here, are always alone,
every city alone in this country,
which has never learned to accept it's cities,
every city on it's own,


alone,
and doomed,
"born to lose" written on it's walls,
yet, here we stay in it,
and keep coming to it,
we keep pouring ourselves in and out,
We light the skies with ourselves sometimes,
sometimes someone may be watching those lights.

We are using ourselves,
people , bodies,
instead of trees and grass, and earth
We eat people instead of eating the land,
We watch love and hate bloom all around us,
not weeds or flowers, as in so many other places
We keep thinking we are making something from our own
bones and blood, and flesh,
and not, like the others, living off the land

We know that the oldest city was so,
We know that the newest city will be so,
It will always be the place the others use,
while they keep complaining about it,
while they send what they make from the earth,
while they send what they can't use,
while they send what they want to sell
for what we have to give them in return

They send their poets, and their whores,
and their painters, their conmen,
their dancers, their thieves,
their dreamers, their murderers,
and we add our own to these, yes,
maybe you can not have one without the other,
maybe, indeed, you need all in this city,
I don't know if this is right,
I only know the need to use oneself,
to bet on oneself even when it's fixed,
rather than watching things grow outside one,
and then killing them,
and then piling them up,

And then, when the ports and the crossroads,
and the easy-jumps-across-rivers

aren't needed anymore for their commerce,
the songs, and the poems,
and the dancers, and the drawings
of things imagined and real,
will come out of the rub of people against people,
will keep pouring out of the city's people,
feeding the people who are angry,
feeding them,
This feeding started in the first gathering,
and will go on until the last gathering,
because while the world builds itself in the void,
people alone hunger for eachother always,
for whatever it is that only people can make,
for whatever it is that only people can feed eachother.