Where the nightmare tramples words,
as if elite were equality misspelt,
picture a small child by a fence,
by a fence with railings,
and a dog, matted fur, a stray,
limping its way across waste ground.
Picture the autumn shadows cast
by a sculpted apartment block,
coloured carpets on the balconies,
the deep wet fallen leaves
(even fallen leaves cast a shadow).
The dog stops to sniff at a tree root.
The kid runs about, watches, breathes in.
Birds squabble on leafless branches.
Above it all, a half-hearted sun
does its best to vanquish the clouds.
We’re living in a post-war thriller.
The dog may well have its day.
Everything is unexpurgated.
That’s how it is: made of cardboard,
the erased URL of a porn film,
the great damn breasts of a dog
that suture the wounds which cut
into the place where we are.
I’ve had enough of this.
But I can’t walk away.
I’m on the corner of a street.
And that’s precisely where I am.
Architecture inherits its own tyranny.
Love’s simply not up to so much
as a Greek island where blue paint
and an out-of-focus beach is all we need
and a stray dog shits on the pavement.
And the kid … well, the kid just turns away.
Tom Phillips
Written in Sofia, 2018, for 1,000 Poets For Change and published in Mitko Gogo's Macedonian translation here.
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