BODY
The spine of glass and steel
arches over the dawn traffic jam.
Skyscraper vertebrae
with the osteoporosis of their names.
Liquor-wind washes
the grey matter of façades.
Bridge-ribs fused crookedly.
The city hunches. Tram tracks creak like joints.
Metro arteries pulse with systolic carriages.
Blood-people thicken into clots
at transfer stations.
Traffic lights count diastoles:
three seconds of inhale, three of spasm.
Horns — a cough.
A capillary bursts on the ring road.
Dawn asthma. Smog in the lungs of floors.
The sewer’s intestines
digest plastic and strangers’ voices.
At three in the morning
the bare nerves of shop windows go silent.
The city undresses down to its wires,
counts windows like sheep.
A short blackout between sirens.
Morning again: pulse, smog temperature.
A thermometer in someone’s hand.
Whose body is this?
Maybe we don’t exist.
We are only its cells, convinced of freedom,
while the metro-heart beats
to the rhythm of someone else’s breathing.