Vishal Dutia

The great, grey wastes on a Sunday morn’.
Broken buildings, forgotten, forlorn. 
A gloomy land for whom Heaven can’t wait. 
A rundown, rotting council estate. 

She lives in a ragged and ratty old place,
with the dirt of a city smeared right across her face. 
He lives on the opposite side of the waste, 
where the petrol chokes the lungs with a slick, sour taste.

Swiftly and soundly does day drain to night, 
making little difference at all in a place none so bright.
A rumble above signals a potential for wet,
in a smog-ridden badland that was no reason to fret. 

They meet in the middle and they watch all the cars,
whose engines corrupt and then blot out the stars.
They search the strewn rubbish for treasure and treats,
in the chilly desolation of the urban streets.

They rush, hand-in-hand, past the tenement flats,
laughing and skipping and dodging the rats,
as the moon watches passively behind great clouds of dust,
displaying all the savageness of the decay and the rust.

On they run, girl and boy, hand-in-hand,
two specks in the litter of the lay of the land. 
Onward and onward in the evening’s grim light. 
Flecked in the ash of the fires of the night.

They come to a street with a broken-down track, 
on which tired old trains labour forth and back. 
She first runs across and spots a pile of bricks,
she intends to poke through them with some sturdy old sticks. 

He pauses on the track, savouring the oncoming rain,
unaware of the rush of the incoming train. 
She’s off and away in her little own dream, 
as he’s caught in the glow of the train’s flooding beam.

A deer in the headlights, frozen to the ground.
She hears the roar of chugging metal and quickly turns around.
She catches briefly that look in his watery eyes,
as the passing of the train drowned out both of their cries. 

© VishalDutia