4:30am

Each day is a bad day,

Wake up without a thought or feeling,

Shoes on - out of the door

Stop to check the cobwebs forming themselves carefully across the wall.

Hear the pipes clatter across the stairs

And the roar of cars across the street,

Where midnight drunkards

Out of their minds

Stop time with a bottle.

II

Across the valley in the ground

Filled by a puddle

Blasts the curses of a car

Splash the sound pedestrians

And bleed down their shoes

Into socks.

III

The jackets against the cold

The people against the world

One of me may change this world

And yet

I struggle

To breathe.

Head under the water I see

The same puddle.

IV

And the bright lights above my head

Ache through the dark.

The same cannot be said for

A man

He went

To Amerika

And took his money

Whilst I cried

With a bottle of gin

Into a Fitzgerald novel

Washing the Kafka away.