Elegy for the Downtrodden

Do roads ever talk among themselves

About the blood

that people spilled on them

Sometimes even nonchalantly

jerking their bodies

And smashing their brains in the asphalt

Do they talk about cars making love to each other

crashing into steel

The searing heat

Branding their affections

With a fireworks display of luminous sparks

And smoke

Do they ever see the men,

Tired of slips and burns,

Their impotency and their home loans,

And kids and work and

Their lack of importance,

Their lack of masculine effort

So tired that they

run and they run on the roads in cricles till their feet bleed

And somehow they sit down silent

Tired out of the sheer exhaustion

And sleep a sleep that's dotted with daydreams

And sleep a sleep that's forever.

Do roads converse in black

Or do they adorn themselves

With the littered dead flowers

And the plastic that humans peel

From their faces

And throw out on the roads to be cooked in

The sun.

The disfigured rose

that didn't win a heart,

A cigarette butt still glowing

Cheap Ecstasy being scooped up by poverty to

Forget his tantrums

The girl being dragged off into the alleyways

Into the night that's young with

People drinking shots and partying

And do roads talk about youth and her fancies

Her terms and conditions and diseases and affections.

The morbid thoughts that creep into the brain of a stillborn girl

bloom into pestering

Weeds that grow themselves into concrete buildings

Housing shivering cowardly Orthodoxy

And

do roads talk about

The future when

People won't walk over them anymore and

Do they talk about missing the pain they've grown used to

The constant stench of ammonia and devastation

The exhilarating pain that's riddled with

Ambulance lights and bomb squads

And hospitals denying pregnant women

Because they belonged to the streets

And do they talk about who'll take care of the radioactive homeless and provide them life when

In the future

The tarmac will lie in pregnant, ripe silence.

I guess all they ever talk about is

Whether we will ever pay back our debt to them.

And sometimes,

This debt drives me mad