by step2247

Created on: September 11, 2009   Last Updated: September 12, 2009

Nightscape

The nights are the hardest.

The cool empty darkness attaches itself to the heavens,

As the winter dirges spring forth out from forgotten lands.

The roar of the winds can kill in the night.

Ragged old men,

With the stiff scent of bourbon permeating from their clothes,

Stumble across the decaying streets;

They have no better place to be tonight.

The street lamps shine on whitewashed buildings

And chipped away sidewalks. Buffalo is a unique city

With a mystic all her own.

Born from the countless dreams of the industrial age

The city once pulsed with a magical electricity.

There were no limits,

Boundless potential circulating through the streets,

The steel frames now haunt the city like some cruel boogey-man laughing in the night.

There is no escape here from the whipping sounds of the winds outside.

They steal across the alleyways,

Rise-up along a building;

Strengthen in ferocity until a deafening din

Controls the atmosphere.

I feel uncomfortable in the presence of City Hall.

Twenty-six stories of an Art-Deco masterpiece

Turned twenty-six stories of an Art-Deco hell.

The sickening green patina of the spire is troubling to me.

Is it not the effect of corrosion?

Why do we value it so?

Perhaps man cannot let go so easily of his fortune

And so he must align himself to the remnants of his past wealth.

(He sees past the green he must force himself to)

It was once great...but that's not enough.

The beauty is fading.

No matter how you try to conceal it

The beauty is fading.

The twilight descends upon the cityscape,

Encasing all but a strange eerie glow that radiates from worn-out streetlamps.

It keeps me awake.

I hear packs of sirens wail through the air.

They are the sounds of false hope approaching in the night

(Another shooting maybe)

Just another life wasting away on the streets of Buffalo.

A stiffening body lying in some back alley with its blood soaking into the snow...

The pigments of red penetrating the soft purity of each flake.

The sirens muffle out;

They are headed towards the east

(Maybe a drug bust gone wrong).

Either way it's nothing new...the evenings bring nothing new.

Somewhere an old tattered unshaven man huddles close to his trash-canned fire,

Burning anything and everything to survive the night.

Somewhere a young mother driving home alone on a highway

Skids on a patch of black ice.

Her last vision is the old oak tree that momentarily will rip through her life.

With the force of the jolt her seatbelt turns to a knife

That slices through her dreams, quietly in the night.

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