Billboard

Rain.

Wet streets glisten.

Traffic hiss rises, falls,

Joins the downpour's rythm,

Lost in transit.

An urban tinnitus

Thrums in the head

Like nervous energy

Tight and subdural, deafened.

Shrill sound compresses,

Dies in the eddying wind.

Hurtling transport's wheelspray

Turns the eyes blind.

Shadow fragments capture each other

In the shapeless drizzle.

So much starlight,

Far from heaven,

Scattering drop by drop.

The streets are empty and lined

With dark facades,

Dim under unsteady sodium light,

Harsh under neon.

City background flickers

Like a projected image:

Its reality intermittent,

Its true nature, like a vacuum,

A totality of lack.

Frontages on every street

Mask their unlit ruins,

Every sagging parapet or roofline,

Every windowless block,

Sites of dereliction.

Beside them, in another thin disguise,

Hoardings of buckled ply

Carry a wallpaper of lies and half-truths,

Hold up proclamations to our sight.

The scant reverse of knowledge

Papers over the cracks

With hollowed out slogans.

Through rain and heavy weather

The storms that lash out the future

Above the city and its roofs

Wrap the high towers in scouring cloud.

Far below, advertisers speak in tongues

Hymn out their religion of things

Write holy expectation on pages,

Vast pages pasted over yesterday's rags.

So are we rendered captive,

We, the least, blind creatures

Of the city streets.

Like scrabbling insects on a forest floor

Burrowing in the dripping-wet mould.

We are constant prey for one another,

Oblivious to the bleak monsoon

In which we drown.

No horizons comfort us

Yet the billboard wonderlands

Promise to lead us home.

The stories pictured there

Show us the freedom of mountains.

Blue-sky retreats far from dismal daylight,

Warm homes in winter,

Gardens green in summer,

And a million other places where others live...

...in whose world, not ours

With happiness fat on their faces

Reclining armchair armies

Wrap repose around themselves

In a gesture, satisfaction

Lifts their half-wit smiles

To a pixellated heaven

Where no-one here will ever go.

© BH 2015

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'This town is coming like a ghost town.' Nothing has changed since 2-Tone and the Specials. Written in idleness on a slack day at the office. There was no rain, more of a sly sleet. The promises rang as hollow and remained as unfeasible.