The air is heavy.

Fuck. That’s not it.

The air is thick.

No.

The air is pregnant.

Definitely not.

The air is heavy.

Ok, fine.

A thick stew of rain rises in a ricochet from the pavement. Aerosolizing and impregnating the air with it’s filthy, sweet, sweaty mix of waterdirtshitbacteria soup. It rises up from the block.

A singing sound of puddles splashing and the trash being sodden. I am one with the garbage gods of the city. I sit in zazen with the reek and the rain and the putrid decay. I shiver at the emptiness of thought.

What is this trash? What is ugliness? We hide from the mountain of our own discard until it becomes too large, looming over the pristine lie we’ve built.

I live in a lie that says I’ll try until the day I die.
I die to become part of the mess I struggled to separate.
A life lonely, free of waste.
Until the waste reclaims me.

You and I, they and them, us.
All the blame lies somewhere,
but OH, not ME.

I cannot ignore the overflow of what remains. Thick, Heavy, impregnated with the plastic discard and shards of our filth. We breathe and seep and sop it up in our pores and tongues.

The leaking pus behind sleek masks of post modernism. The hands of a few cannot undo the destruction.