Filth

It bubbles.

It gushes.

It stinks.

It degenerates.

It is just as human as any of us… the drainpipe.

It bubbles with stench, with black water…

It gushes with life: not vigour, but the sheer disgust of existence.

With the black water that flows through it, it gets blackened too.

Whenever it has resisted,

Has choked with tangles of dark hair,

Has coughed up little spurts of black blood,

Whenever it has tried retching the filth away,

Acid has been poured to ‘clear’ her breast, to burn it.

I remember its predecessors:

The first, and the one that came after and the next one too.

All had gradually given way to crumble and decay.

This one was painted bright sporty green.

It became bottle green, brown, dirty black ad pitch.

Its outer cover is hard and corrugated…

Proceeding gradually towards brittleness, bitterness.

But its inner layers are soft, tender:

Many have peeled off, few are still left...

It has a continuous chain of malignant tumours,

It is a reluctant human bomb that inevitably kills itself.

Its vitals are dead.