The Beast in the City

There’s a lonely man walking a deserted street

In the middle of a wasteland of a city

Where old empty warehouses with cracked windows

Look down in their wasted majesty

at the empty streets below.

There once was a busy district full of piano shops

And corner delis but now there is only smoke in the air

From the factory that belches day and night

But no one knows why anymore.

There is something following, something beastly,

He can feel it, he can hear it, but he can’t see it.

It is just out of sight in the shadows around the corner

behind the old bus station in the middle of town.

There are houses where nobody lives.

No lights, no cars, overgrown lawns, and alleys

where the ghosts of old dead men take a piss

and beg for cigarettes and whiskey and

long for their old dead wives.

There’s a lonely truck wandering the roads

Lost in the empty mazes of empty commerce

Dark windshield reflects the street lights

As if driving itself, looking for a place to unload

Its unused, useless cargo.

The man hurries his step as the beast rounds the corner

visible only as blankness and its silhouette against the city lights.

It eats up space as it passes and

emits nothingness from its hindquarters

turning the sidewalk to ashes and disturbing the night.

The silent traffic lights blink their eyes in scorn but

Otherwise ignore him as he hurriedly crosses

and passes the dark pawnshop with the jailhouse gates

and the dormant gas station with the cracked pavement

and an island where the pumps were taken away.

Worn construction barriers bar his way.

Symbols of a project long since abandoned

When the money ran out and the people fled

the drug dealers and the gangs and the rapists

hiding in the park at night for their prey.

Now even they are gone to the suburbs.

But the beast huffs its wheezing cough

and floats along on its trail of dark shadows.

The man is frightened as it closes in.

Still unseen but there nonetheless

A cloud of invisible vapors roiling along.

There’s a lonely train rumbling down the tracks

Below the bridge with the spray-painted graffiti.

Bellowing its mournful wail at the crossing

Clicking and clacking, not stopping, not slowing,

As if to escape as soon as it can.

The man pauses and watches it pass below

and forgets his fears for just a moment

Counting the cars, the tankers, the flatbeds,

and contemplates an end underneath

the grinding gruesome wheels, but then

he shudders, takes a breath, and hurries on.

Still he senses the beast’s dark approach.

It is hungry and crying soft mews into the night.

Its belly burns and belches with pangs of starvation

which can never be satisfied and it ceaselessly yearns

for the flesh and entrails of its victims.

There’s a lonely city on the edge of oblivion

Closing its eyes and passing into a slumber

from which it might never awake.

It is still, all is silent, but for the fading sounds

of a freight train hastily passing through.

The man steps over the jumbled bones of

a broken street under a failing streetlight.

A green sign shows the way to nowhere

along an empty one-way street with

red traffic lights casting their illumination

on the darkened store windows along the way.

Still the beast lumbers along as it follows

along the pavement with the potholes.

And the man is no longer hurrying quite so fast

As he glances into shops and stops to decide

whether to turn or continue straight into the night.