Drainage

The drainage overflows.

Evasive people pass by,

their heads locked inside their phones.

So many souls around,

but who knows where they’re going?

These streets are overwhelmed,

the drainage overflowing.

The rain cannot clean this asphalt,

it is sodden with our waste,

the rain cannot clean these bloodstains,

they’re decorative, just paint,

the rain cannot free these bodies,

they’re broken down,

they’re turned to paste,

the drainage builds, then overflows,

those close to it make haste.

I remember

the look in your eyes, perplexed

contours buried in your face,

a sense of something broken now, an

unsalvageable place, we packed and ran and stole and scanned and ran this bloodied race

but we could not escape our fates, both of us were made to be mistakes, born to die it seems. Your legs can

only run so far, your body turning

numb, the lactic acid building up, blood struggling to

pump, these rainy skies, I could have died when

they broke our sacred space, my final memory

the blood turned dry

upon your shattered face. The glass shield turned to

fragments which I step on every

day, my raw feet burn with each step

into the sewage

these pains and memories we can’t erase,

my world destroyed, the world destroyed,

but we got what we deserved,

countless deaths, no one attests,

nothing worth being conserved

… and it became

so cold

our bodies froze

atop those toughened lakes. The drainage

overflowing, no one knew what it would

take.