Urban Poison

 

 

Today’s raining here. It seems to rain everyday, in this city. I wonder where the blue sky has gone… swallowed by grey clouds I guess. The hot drops fall all over me wetting my clothes and my hair, then dying on the dirty grey cement of the broken roads. I find cover under a building, in front of real estate agencies filled with Chinese signs offering flats in this hopeless periphery of the great whore of the East,

Shanghai . I smoke a cigarette waiting for the rain to go, but it’s pointless… the rain increases, and my body aches breathing the grey flavourless smoke which poisons my lungs. I throw the unfinished cigarette on the street, quenching its fire in a muddy pond.

 The people around me are all the same, I can’t tell one from another. Dressed in shabby clothes, with swarthy yellow skin and with the same detachment for the laowai, the foreigner. I think I would like to lay me down and die here, just if the ground wasn’t so disgusting I even loath to die in such a place.

 Apathy is creeping like a disease inside me, killing like a poison every hope, every desire, every care for virtue or growth. All is grey, and I’m turning grey, too.