Some rare days, I slip out of my pocket corner’s obscurity and explore the greater thread of city life.
Not that I venture too far from the threadbare polish of surfaces ironed smooth by much wash & wear for keeping up appearances- after all, what is a pleat or sharp crease but a wrinkle enforced along desired lines?
But I like to take small detours into the other unfinished side.
We walked the retreads of set explorer fashion in ironic costuming of the established way to go, because how can you claim to know or have been if you take ways unfamiliar, ways unseen?
(Smirking, shaking with mirth mix’d with distaste for pretentious propriety, I hie me off, and lift my sights to the battered down & outskirts of hometown side streets and dive in between for off-beat, off scene, local color-full variety.)
But always returning to my stitched-set corners’ comforts wears thin on me sometimes, aware there’s more worn of cloth uncut by my wanderings, and a determination to shear from these tired retread’s lines grows ever-if slowly, surely-more keen.
She isn’t shy, this city of mine:
But she’s got more depth than her forced gracious hostess style-
Relaxed, she lets you find your pace in her quirks and nooks by design, though there’s a wilder, grittier side that not many want to see because it involves getting dirty.
Although we citizens must make the best of scrap ends, we form a vibrant patchwork community that puts the sleek show side to shame:
Here you may find the holes that hold those who’ve slipped between the threads of society, and though all I manage now is glimpses of this unsavoury nudity, there’s exposure that helps more for its blatant admission of amending needs.
She/he stands here divested of fine image
(desperation will strip pretense faster than a child on a naturalist streak),
raw and fraying more than edges, human and showing still some unworn fibre of integrity even through the warp of lives devoid of dignifying roofs’ facade of respectability;
when in fact, the farce is shown in how deathly a dearth of compassionate cloth those hid behind the wearing garb of policy tear away rights to attempt (ununiformed) plainclothes distribution of necessities’ dignity.
Like cruel bullies driving wedg(i)es in enforced aborting of now-abbreviated efforts to lift lives slipping under the edge of fraying stability’s frame, they moon-light in gaslighting this attempted aid as cause for our shame-
as if inability to conform to their regulations’ cage equates to criminality, while weaving prison stripes in barring decency of common liberty to independently cover systemic inadequacies without strictures of enforced institutionalization-
But where the need is greatest, authority’s rigors’ strength is slowest to lend its heft…
when honor is a title rather than a virtue kept, cash redirects the agenda of so-called people’s advocates.
I bear witness to political shuttling of culpability that neglects unnecessary glaring holes but buttresses the established & buffs thick gloss of customary largesse to the grandiose:
In support of pageantry of traditions’ showy stand, it sweeps the streets and displaces those called less savory- souls whose appeal is denied for not owning resource to buy share in the prohibitive excess fouling the air with flagrant fashions’ discontented ferment;
decrying the mundane struggles for survival as eyesores, derelict uncivil savages declare people’s unpretty poverty to be a fault solely the victims’ own for soiling the fantastic scenic weave of willful blind eyes’ masqueraded complicit coarse strand tacked to the rough hardship of arrogant power’s unchecked imposing hand…
Not that I venture too far from the threadbare polish of surfaces ironed smooth by much wash & wear for keeping up appearances- after all, what is a pleat or sharp crease but a wrinkle enforced along desired lines?
But I like to take small detours into the other unfinished side.
We walked the retreads of set explorer fashion in ironic costuming of the established way to go, because how can you claim to know or have been if you take ways unfamiliar, ways unseen?
(Smirking, shaking with mirth mix’d with distaste for pretentious propriety, I hie me off, and lift my sights to the battered down & outskirts of hometown side streets and dive in between for off-beat, off scene, local color-full variety.)
But always returning to my stitched-set corners’ comforts wears thin on me sometimes, aware there’s more worn of cloth uncut by my wanderings, and a determination to shear from these tired retread’s lines grows ever-if slowly, surely-more keen.
She isn’t shy, this city of mine:
But she’s got more depth than her forced gracious hostess style-
Relaxed, she lets you find your pace in her quirks and nooks by design, though there’s a wilder, grittier side that not many want to see because it involves getting dirty.
Although we citizens must make the best of scrap ends, we form a vibrant patchwork community that puts the sleek show side to shame:
Here you may find the holes that hold those who’ve slipped between the threads of society, and though all I manage now is glimpses of this unsavoury nudity, there’s exposure that helps more for its blatant admission of amending needs.
She/he stands here divested of fine image
(desperation will strip pretense faster than a child on a naturalist streak),
raw and fraying more than edges, human and showing still some unworn fibre of integrity even through the warp of lives devoid of dignifying roofs’ facade of respectability;
when in fact, the farce is shown in how deathly a dearth of compassionate cloth those hid behind the wearing garb of policy tear away rights to attempt (ununiformed) plainclothes distribution of necessities’ dignity.
Like cruel bullies driving wedg(i)es in enforced aborting of now-abbreviated efforts to lift lives slipping under the edge of fraying stability’s frame, they moon-light in gaslighting this attempted aid as cause for our shame-
as if inability to conform to their regulations’ cage equates to criminality, while weaving prison stripes in barring decency of common liberty to independently cover systemic inadequacies without strictures of enforced institutionalization-
But where the need is greatest, authority’s rigors’ strength is slowest to lend its heft…
when honor is a title rather than a virtue kept, cash redirects the agenda of so-called people’s advocates.
I bear witness to political shuttling of culpability that neglects unnecessary glaring holes but buttresses the established & buffs thick gloss of customary largesse to the grandiose:
In support of pageantry of traditions’ showy stand, it sweeps the streets and displaces those called less savory- souls whose appeal is denied for not owning resource to buy share in the prohibitive excess fouling the air with flagrant fashions’ discontented ferment;
decrying the mundane struggles for survival as eyesores, derelict uncivil savages declare people’s unpretty poverty to be a fault solely the victims’ own for soiling the fantastic scenic weave of willful blind eyes’ masqueraded complicit coarse strand tacked to the rough hardship of arrogant power’s unchecked imposing hand…