Busted, in Holborn
Forget what you know about this city. The lights
are just a dim decay of lives splitting open
to reveal they are beehives by day, solemn
by night, awkward mausoleums encumbered
with emotions that do not justify death, or songs
that sometimes saunter through windows
and remind us that we were never rich enough
to pull the red beats of intelligence into focus.
This city, as with billfolds and eyes—brine-crusted;
pocketed with lube and flesh; harboring quarters
of cheese dust and paper in the creases—speaks
and recedes into everything as common as Home.
This city is not complex. We all speak of bursting
cities with difference: its spaces rupture into half-
resolved urgings scuffed and unwilling and taut
against the restraints of moaning. But the aches
will never set in a mind that constantly exhumes
street histories: or, in other words, do not believe
in glass; glass breaks as suddenly as fingernails,
polished and darkly transposed against the sun.
Glass bows when distorted, taking for its object
every life that imagines love and lust, and wants.
—Chase M. Ledin
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Chase M. Ledin has published work in Glitterwolf Magazine, A Literation Magazine, and RoguePoetry Review. He received a Bachelor’s from The Ohio State University, and is currently a master’s student at King’s College London. He currently lives in London, United Kingdom.