I
When sidewalks give way to old women with soft songs,
And the new air of night has pressed itself into oblivion.
When red and old bricks pave the streets and the walls,
And the music of the south moves with ravenous desire.
Pushed into ornate thrones,
With seafood and cooked dough served quietly in the night.
Cloth and sweaters too much for the heat,
But bare skin causing bites from the cold.
With canyons under his lips he moves,
In a self sacrificial waltz—
Or tango.
Uncoordinated and uncommitted,
But present under the night,
He moves without consideration.

II
This concrete is dying.
Crumbling away with memories of a richer past,
And golden curtains to block the constant light.
Now cast in shadows,
With empty rooms and beds made but not used.
He sits, and he shatters, and he crumbles, and Is His Own Ruin.
Calling for similar décor and decay,
As metal seems to move beneath his feet.
Demanding water from the same city,
He moves without consideration.
He knows not of his desires,
Or rather cannot comprehend them.
As red flowers are offered to his clenched fists
He does not notice.
Obsessed by the power of the false heart that appears,
At certain times, but never as a constant.
But nothing is, he says.

III
This bridge is dying.
Left in the ruins of autocracy and oppression,
Its promise of transport is all it can provide—though
Often not even that.
Left now to villains of stories for a nation without water,
Only the defeat of dusk brings any solace.
A circle of humans, symmetrical and still,
Casting voices and melodies into the new air of night.
Exalting hymns though this cannot be for certain.
The beauty of decay and the powerful,
He does not listen.
This is not music to waltz to—
Or tango.
He leans back into the night with no sign of vulnerability,
But every sign of defeat.
The voices carry on.

IV
This old and dusted bar is dying.
Empty booths and cups and a drought for the people
Of a foreign nation, close to home.
With language pulled from pinched skin and spread
Against the clouded room.
Things lost in translation and destroyed again,
Without understanding of necessity or survival.
He mocks those who jump in the lake.
He is silent while the overextended party pulses depressingly.
These noises are too heavy,
These sounds too incomprehensible.
He, too, is dying.
This ephemeral notion of worth will soon be lost,
Though it seems a while for him, for us.
His bones become tealeaves and lemons for a new generation
Of alienated intellectuals.

V
When steaming sheets of metal fry beneath conceptual luxury
And buildings turn to glass and shatter.
When the city separates and splits into the waters of illness,
And sharpness breaks the ideals of murmuring skin.
He sits, and he shatters, and he crumbles,
And Is His Own Ruin.